


Greasepaint

by TopHat



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: AltTaylor, DC-Inspired, First chapter is potential spoilers, Funny buy Not sometimes, Gen, New York, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:08:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 35,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23237473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat
Summary: Taylor has a different Trigger Event, mutates, and things change quickly.
Kudos: 30





	1. Timeline

October 3rd: Shadow Stalker reports a potential threat to her identity.  
  
October 4th: A girl emerges from the sewers.

October 5th: A break-in occurs.

October 14th: A new employee gets pulled into the fold at Thirteenth Heaven.

October 25th: Attempts to negotiate with a new parahuman fall through, and they receive the previsionary name "Pagliacci."

October 31st: A reporter gets held-up and left with a story.

November 5th: An apartment superintendent hires a new employee illegally.

November 18th: A young man joins a gang.

November 24th: A heavily-covered figure is seen entering Flower-Power Florists/Human Resources.

November 27th: The Teeth leave New York after recruiting Reave.

December 8th: A Ward engages with a mysterious parahuman, to relatively little end result.

December 9th: New York's New Cape thread is temporarily locked in response to egregious breeches of conduct.

December 17th: A bank robbery where an outside parahuman interfered, leading to a safe resolution.

January 8th: Glamshow requests personal leave and receives it.

January 15th: Glamshow requests personal leave and receives it.

January 16th: Complaints are filed against a civilian employee and dismissed. Flag count upped by one.

January 21st: At 00:07 a Ward ends up unmasked by Pagliacci, intent unknown but assumed. Wards are now under instruction not to engage, and future Thinktank minutes will be spent pursuing Pagliacci.


	2. Expectations 0.0

Aristotle said that the key to good humor was expectation delivered on in a surprising way.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A girl walks into school. She goes to her locker, hopeful. Her expectations have been raised, courtesy of good behavior from her tormentors. She opens it up, finds the locker filled with blood and horror, then gets shoved in. Everyone laughs, nervously, but they do. The girl howls, screams, tries to escape, triggers, keeps trying to escape, then triggers again when no one helps her. Not exactly grade-A material, but what can you expect from high schoolers? Anyway, I don’t like that story. Breaks my suspension of disbelief, requires a whole lot of things to go wrong, and it really falls off in the end. It’s also more than a million words long, which is way too many for the punchline to be any good. Short and sweet is the key, right?

Here’s another one. It’s the same set up. Girl, high lowered expectations, locker. This time she punches her way out, takes a little nibble, then binges her way through half a dozen household appliances. Tens of thousand words later she kisses a different girl who had nothing to do with the joke, but that’s alright because she did have something to do with the story. This one twists what you think you know, flips shit up down left right center and back, and it really doesn’t care. This girl doesn’t have anything to prove, and that’s alright because the joke’s not on anyone. It’s just funny.

Anyway, the joke. One girl sees a cape. The cape hits her, then invites her very best friend over to talk about seeing her. The very best friend sees the girl, the girl sees her very best friend. The whole house of cards the very best friend has set up comes tumbling down as she tries to explain the to girl the whys and hows, tries to use the cape’s paradigm to justify just how fucked-up she is. The cape demands an answer, the very best friend gives her one, and the girl dies.

Well, almost.

So. Humor. Expectation, unexpected fulfillment. Mess up either part and the joke falls flat, like an ice skater who fucks up a spin and throws his partner to the cold, or a clown without makeup, or sex without a condom.

See? See that? It wasn’t funny. There was no lead up, just a dirty word thrown out, like pissing into the wind. Comedy’s pyrotechnics, not lightning. It’s an act, not improv. Hell, even the times it is improv there’s hundreds of hours of practice behind it, free association and training on how to think and old references well-rehearsed and (if you’re lucky) in-jokes that fall back into a well-worn rut of laughter. Call, response, like rallying in tennis but filled with social information that you can’t just say straight-out, and it all has to seem like it comes off-the-cuff.

No wonder clowns drink.

(See? That one worked.)

What’s our expectation? We have the very best friend, we have our cape, and we have our girl. We’ve got our Authority Figures, our Plucky Teenage Rebels, our Chaotic Evil Villains, our Big Bads, our Bigger Bads, and our Biggest Bad. There’s an ensemble, a supporting cast, some more interesting than others, and a world on the brink. All that leads to patterns. The bad guys lose, the good guys win, and while something’s lost, something’s gained. It’s a tale as old as time, and every time these caricatures show up everyone’s ears perk up, good little doggies waiting for their treat.

Except that’s not how the bad joke goes. We don’t get a good guy, we don’t get bad guys who matter, we don’t even get comeuppance for half the wrongs, and the whole thing spins its gears until they damn wheels fall off. It’s a bad joke because it shouldn’t work, because it ignores half of the well-used tools that’ve been developed over the course of millennia, because the serpent stretches out for too long on too little, a tent of parchment-thin skin and tangled organs. Something lives in there, multiple somethings, but they’re so lost in the rot that you have to laugh.

The good joke though, it’s all in there. There’s a bad guy who isn’t so bad, a good person who really is that good, things lost which are worth losing, and the things gained are worth the hassle. It’s a chandelier, it’s a mosaic, it’s a chuckle pure enough to shatter a wine glass, it’s...

It’s so clear it hurts to look at it sometimes.

The joke never loses itself to the pattern though. It goes through the motions because it makes sense, because the calendar inside measures out the right time, because its internal metronome naturally falls towards the most perfect tempo. It’s not puppeteering, it’s not acting out the scenes, it’s acting straight-up. It feels natural, flows off-the-cuff, defines its own geometry, and never, ever shatters the illusion of effortlessness.

We’ve got our bad joke, the one that doesn’t go anywhere in a twisted attempt to bite its own tail. We’ve got our good joke, the one that checks all the boxes without only checking all the boxes. There’s an expectation, tweaked a little by the specific props in play and the lack of stagetech. There’s something right there, in your head, taking shape, and that’s the drawing board. I can twist it, paint it cherry red and neon green and chalk white, play off the levers everyone has that the patterns and jokes of old discovered by trial and error and observation, but it’s still out of sight and Jackson Pollock was a hack.

That’s the set-up. Two jokes, three girls of varying decency, and a whole fuckton of people in a jagged half-formed world. Expectations change as you name them, change as you acknowledge the acknowledgement, but that’s there too, however fragile.

And all that’s left is to execute.


	3. Run-Up 1.1

There were a couple key instincts you developed when you had to survive in the Docks.  
  
The first was being able to smell danger. The college kids who volunteered at the shelters thought it was a metaphor, thought that Tim was joking when he said could tell if someone was trustworthy from a whiff of their stank from downwind. He was dead serious. Bad drugs fucked you up inside while good ones lingered for a while, and if you sniffed hard enough the difference was obvious. Plus, the dealers who knew what they were doing also knew how to buy a goddamn stick of deodorant. BO meant that they were either too lazy to go to the drug store in nice clothes or just didn’t care, both of which drove up the odds that the dealer didn’t check their product before selling it. If Tim didn’t like the smell of a guy, he didn’t buy from them. That was just good sense.  
  
Another trick was making a rock-solid map of the territory, stapling it to the inside of your skull, and updating it _constantly_. No one talked like drifters, and rumors of a change from the ABB to the Empire could be the difference between being getting kicked in the ribs and getting your throat cut. It was also developing because shortcuts opened and closed all the time, and knowing which ones lead where could save your skin. Maybe an alleyway was warm and dry enough to sleep in, with a dumpster right next to a soup kitchen that usually had something halfway edible, maybe it had become part of a nastier-than-normal pimp’s strip. Brockton changed weekly, and the homeless who forgot that tended not to last long.  
  
The final must-have know-how was when to to take a risk. A college kid had explained the fallacy to him, where people opened themselves up to the worst possible outcomes in hopes of losing nothing and closed themselves off from the best because they were afraid of losing everything. Quit while you were ahead, commit while you were behind, an always losing strategy. He said that it didn’t matter whether you were risk-seeking or risk-adverse, whatever that meant, so long as you chose consistently.  
  
Mind, the kid also assumed that people’s fail states left them ahead, and he said it with a straight face.  
  
Tim just smiled, took his bag of toiletries, and decided not to pop him in the mouth for telling someone with a gimp leg to go out on a limb.  
  
The kid had been on to something though. Ever since that fateful day, Tim had started playing the odds. Nothing stupid, nothing that could get him killed, but he stuck his neck out, looked into the lower-yield and lower-population territory, slept in less-safe locations, and mostly wasn’t punished for it. The exploration gave him new secrets, new pathways between sleeping places, and he started putting on weight. That, in turn, attracted more attention from other hungry eyes, and to keep them from eating him Tim took another risk: he started talking.  
  
Information was currency. Safe sleeping spots could be used by a finite number of people, supply outstripped demand, and the price rose in blood. Good trash cans, if over-harvested, didn’t feed anyone. Businesses were okay with one person using their bathroom, not okay with five. If you had a place for something, you kept your damn mouth shut about it except when the secret could cost you your life. Tim, however, had accidentally picked up more secrets than he knew what to do with, and found a customer base that had unlimited want.  
  
At first, Tim traded secrets on a one-to-one basis. Then he asked for a little more when a lot of the ‘secrets’ started overlapping with one another, then he started getting discerning. The secrets changed from places to people to ideas to structures, his clients from fellow street bums to kids looking for a high to gang members to _capes_ to all of the above. With the diversification of capital came wealth, real wealth, and with wealth came permanent residence. Still not out of the Docks, still nothing that required a Social Security Number, but stable in a way that he didn’t have before.  
  
Tim never forgot just how good the grapevine was though, nor just how desperate a junkie could get for their next high. His back door was always open for people who had juicy gossip, and shit he was out-of-the-know on was a meal and a few bucks to anyone who made him in-the-know on it. Nine times out of ten the info was old, out of date, or useless, and Tim traded his time and a granola bar for jack shit, but that one time out of ten tended to really pay off.  
  
After handing the ragged lady a small roll of bills and a bag of food, Tim closed the door and mulled over the news. Little girl climbs out of a sewer pipe ranting and raving, smacks around a pimp looking for girls, then sprints towards the nice part of town. It sounded like someone on a bad first trip, but bad first trips in the Docks were rare. New users were the minority by a _lot_ , and the few that did come down for their hits tended to stay in the crack houses when they were high. It took a special sort of skill to not get mugged when wandering around high, and the dealers wanted repeat customers more than they wanted quick hits of cash. Something had gone fucky, and things that went fucky needed to be investigated.  
  
Tim had two safes. The first one had a few thousand dollars in loose cash, some weed, and a small bag of heroin in it. That one hid under the sink, the first place to check in event of a break-in, big and heavy with an honest-to-god combination on the lock. More than one smash-and-grabber had been distracted by it for long enough to let Tim crack 'em on the back of the head with a pipe, and it was also impressive as hell.  
  
The second one was a thin steel box, installed into a wall and hidden behind a bookshelf too heavy to move quickly or quietly. After spending ten minutes moving the damn thing out of the way, Tim hammered in a twelve-digit string of numbers, waited four heartbeats, and plugged in four more. The combination hissed, disarming the failsafes, and swung open.  
  
Stacks of hundreds, bank-fresh, sat next to a trio of binders, two rolled-up maps, and no fewer than six cheapo phones. Tim grabbed the back-most one, replaced it with an identical model, then closed the safe and spent another ten minutes pushing the bookshelf back into place.  
  
“Paranoid motherfucker,” Tim muttered, flopping down on a second-hand couch that was more patch than original fabric, speed dialing the first and only number.  
  
It picked up on the second ring.  
  
“Whaddya want, cuntmunching sneakshit?” The voice on the other end was rough and high, undeniably masculine and harsh as sandpaper across Tim's balls.  
  
“A little girl threw around a pair of toughs and sprinted out of the Docks. Pretty sure she’s not a client, no idea about trajectory.” Short and to the point, and as brutally honest as he could get. Skids didn’t hold himself to the same standards he held Tim, but Skids was also the one paying Tim’s retainer. That, and Tim liked Skids more than the Empire and Bad Boyz thugs who occasionally stopped by. For that alone Tim would've given Skids first crack at new info.  
  
“Ass-bagging elephant dicks.” The oath was practically solemn, and Tim could hear withered teeth chewing on cracked lips. “Get people looking for her, sneakshit.”  
  
The line cut out. Tim broke the phone in half, dug the SIM card and battery out, then broke the chip in half as well. Thinkers were a constant worry for any halfway competent spy ring, but a halfway competent spy ring also didn’t get noticed by Thinkers if they could at all help it. They did that by passively gathering information through deniable sources that had no idea they were a part of anything and not making big moves.  
  
Skids knew that. He also knew that asking after something specifically was about as big as you could get, and it was going to cost Tim people. That was a fact, straight-up.  
  
Tim took a deep breath, then went to the fridge to get a beer.  
  
Tomorrow, he’d be taking risks.


	4. Run-Up 1.2

When people thought of the Parahuman Response Team, they thought of the troopers. The ones that ran around in heavy armor and heavy weapons, who fought villainous parahumans, who risked their lives on a weekly basis in the mediocre action dramas Karrin liked to binge whenever construction work dried up and she had too much time on her hands. Mary bore the indignity and the jokes with a stoicism born of more than a decade of the married life, and in return Karrin restrained her inner handywoman to only the deck in the back, and then only on weekends.

Even with all that, they still had four swing benches for three people.

Karrin banished thoughts of her wife from her head and knocked three times on the worn wooden door in front of her while Jared adjusted his tie next to her. As police liaisons to the PRT went he was one of the more reasonable ones, for which she was grateful. A fifty year old that looked sixty, he was here in the off chance that Taylor Hebert turned out to not be a parahuman. Wards testimony generally constituted enough for a classification, but Probationary Wards testimony was not.

Officially, Jared was here to cover bases. Officially, he didn’t know anything about the politics of the PRT or Protectorate. Officially everyone was on the same side, and any watchwolfing was the jurisdiction of each branch’s respective Internal Affairs offices.

Unofficially, Jared had offered her a fast track to detective if she wanted to whistleblow on anything. She’d told him to keep the door open.

A tall, thin man opened the door. His hair had started to go, with large green eyes that dwarfed the glasses in front of them. Even though he must have had six inches and twenty pounds on her there was a wispiness to him, like a fire just about to go out. Dark bags hung under his eyes, and his free hand was braced against the door frame, fingers tensed with anticipation.

“Do you have news about Taylor?” he blurted out.

Karrin nodded once. This was going to be rough. “May we come in, Mr. Hebert?”

“Of course, of course,” he said, stepping aside and motioning into his house with one hand. As she and Jared step through a small coat room, Karrin took in the little details. She’d worked with more domestic abuse-related triggers than she cared to remember, and filing a missing persons report for his daughter in no way disqualified him from being the cause.

What she saw was a simple, if sparsely-furnished, living room, with a tiled kitchen on one side. A few dirty plates sat in the sink, which was still running, and as her eyes flicked over it Mr. Hebert walked over and shut the water off.

“Sorry, I was just trying to keep busy,” he said, drying his hands quickly and motioning to the dining table. “Can I get you anything? Coffee, water?”

“I’d take a cup of joe,” Jared said, slowly sitting down on one side of the table. Karrin nodded in assent, taking the seat to the left of him. Once the drinks were in hand, Karrin started talking.

“How much do you know about Taylor’s school life?” she asked, drumming her fingers on the nearly uncomfortably hot mug.

Mr. Hebert shook his head. “I know she’s being bullied. Is it something worse?” He paused, staring into his coffee, then looked up. “Is it a gang?”

“Not yet,” Jared answered carefully, holding his mug under his nose. This one had some chipping around the rim, and when he went to take a sip Karrin winced in anticipation of a cut lip. “We have reason to suspect your daughter is holding a grudge against a parahuman.”

Mr. Hebert stared at Jared blankly. “What?”

Karrin explained the situation as best she could. How a Ward, in their civilian identity, caught Taylor spying on them changing out of costume. She explained how Taylor had fled the scene without hurting anyone, evaded the Ward’s pursuit, and how the police were currently in the process of transferring the investigation over to the PRT. Jared gave Mr. Hebert the statistics about runaways and missing persons, then Karrin the potential legal and social issues of what Taylor could know.

For a long time, the table was silent.

“As bad as things are, no one’s been hurt,” Karrin said quietly. “Odds are she’ll come back home at least once, and there’s precedence for her situation. Talk to her, explain that we can work things out, and everything will turn out alright.”

Mr. Hebert nodded, not really looking at either of them. “Thank you for your time, officers.”

Karrin and Jared took the hint and departed, a pair of business cards left behind just in case things went well when he tried to talk down his daughter.

About halfway back to the station, Jared asked, “Do you think he had anything to do with it?”

Karrin shook her head. “He was afraid for her, not of her. I didn’t see any rage that was out of line with a parent learning their kid had been bullied, and while he could be faking it I’m usually pretty good at spotting when someone’s putting on an act. What do you think?”

A few raindrops smacked into the windshield. Not enough to start the wipers, but Jared rolled up his window anyway. “I think a girl decided to run away from a Ward, and that deserves a think.”


	5. Run-Up 1.3

Maddie had her name for two reasons. First because her Daddy had said that her name was Maggie all those years ago and anything she could do to give his memory a poke in the eye was worth it, and second because people thought she was crazy. Batty Maddie, that’s what they called her back in school, and it helped scare some of the weaker kids away. Really it was almost funny how a little girl could send hooligans running with just words and gestures, but mostly it made her lonely.

“Welp, if you live alone, learn to enjoy your own company,” Maddie muttered to herself, jerking her head up and down at the woman in the mirror. She was old, with grey hair that was going white in places and more wrinkles than anyone wanted to acknowledge. She had her health though, such as it was, and with a pair of glasses she could drive just fine. A little exercise, a few books, and two gin and tonics every night and she’d never felt better. That’s what she told herself, and if delusion was good enough for Mama Lewinsky (Lord rest her soul) then it was good enough for her.

Then glass somewhere in her house broke and Maddie dropped her philosophizing for a Glock.

Two people had broken into Maddie’s house before. One cut himself badly enough stepping through the window that she called nine one one for an ambulance and not the police, while the other got a nine millimeter blow to the shoulder for the stupidity of charging a gunwoman armed with a crowbar. After that most people in the neighborhood knew better than to mess with Batty Maddie, and the criminal grapevine was good enough to know that she didn’t have nearly enough stuff in her house to justify risking a gunshot wound. On the other hand, criminals were people, and people were always dumb enough to surprise.

Maddie moved from her room to the hallway, slowly as she could. Someone had turned the lights on. Once her vision had adjusted, she played her gun across the open space, taking in the details.

The TV was still in the corner of the room, the chotskies on her bookshelves still had a fine layer of dust on them, and the hole in her window was rough and jagged. Her refrigerator was open, and a caustic-smelling trail of clothing led towards the guest bedroom. The sound of running water and dim light leaked out from under the door. After some consideration, Maddie took a seat on the couch and settled in for a wait.

Fifteen minutes later, just as the sun was beginning to rise, the water shut off. Cloth rustled, and more water ran. This was quieter though, a faucet, not a shower. Maddie flexed her hand, took a deep breath, and picked up the gun.

“Come on out with your hands up,” she said, loud and clear. “There’s no window in there, and while I don’t want to put a few holes in the door, I will if it moves too fast.”

There was silence.

Then the door creaked open.

The girl was white. That was surprising. Not because a white person had managed to stumble into Maddie’s neighborhood at this time of night (though that also would’ve raised a number of questions) but because of how white she was. It wasn’t pale, it wasn’t pasty, it was death, like the chalk outline around a corpse, like a doll kept in the dark, like calcified bone, so smooth and seamless that it almost didn’t register as human. Her hair, waist length and already curling, almost looked black, but where the light caught still-damp locks they shone green, somewhere between pine needles at night and bottle glass. Wide lips, a shade that came right out of a bottle of Maraschino cherries, framed a large, expressive mouth, with irises to match, the whites slightly bloodshot. She was tall but thin, and a pilfered shirt hung on her frame like a scarecrow’s, while one hand was dedicated to holding up a loose pair of jeans.

The girl had black nails. Maddie wasn’t quite sure why she seized on that detail, but she did.

For a few seconds the two just stared at one another appraisingly, one stoic and the other as expressive as a rock.

“Now, I know this looks bad,” the girl said, one corner of her mouth twitching up into a half-smile, then falling back into a firmly neutral expression. “But I promise that I didn’t use all of your lipstick.”

A heartbeat passed. Two.

Maddie slowly put the safety back on, letting out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “You look like you’ve got yourself a story to tell, missy.”

The girl laughed once, mouth twitching again. Both sides this time. “You have no idea.” She took a step forward, the denim riding up her shins even as the fabric slapped around her thighs. The safety came off, the gun went up, and she stopped. “Okay, we’re not there yet, I get that and I’ll stay out of arm's reach.” Another pause stretched out. “Can I sit down?”

Maddie nodded her head towards an armchair. The girl ambled over to the seat, folding her hands together and staring intently and Maddie.

“Who are you?” Maddie asked, lowering her gun and eyeing the girl warily.

“Emma, Emma Barnes. Is this the part where you call the police? Because I feel like it would make a lot of sense for you to call the police,” Emma said, looking intently around the room. When her eyes alighted on the soiled clothing she winced. “Man, I forgot just how bad those were. That laundromat is getting a one-star Yelp! review for sure.”

Maddie rolled her eyes. “If I didn’t call the pigs when I found a broken window and a running shower, why’d I call them when I have you at gunpoint?”

“For fun?” Emma tried. When Maddie gave the girl a flat look she sunk a little farther into her armchair. “Yeah, I’m running out of material pretty fast here.”

“Why’re you here? Really,” Maddie asked again, rubbing her temple with one hand.

Emma’s gaze fell to her lap. “Can I plead the Fifth? It’s uh...” She reached up and started playing with a lock of hair. “A little fresh in my mind,” she finished, voice quivering slightly.

Maddie ran her tongue over her teeth, thinking.

Then she stood up, holstered the gun at her hip, and started walking towards the kitchen.

“I’ve got eggs, bacon, and Froot Loops. Cook the first two and I’ll let you polish off the latter. Also, you’re gonna help me fix that window when you’re done.” She pulled the now-empty milk jug out of the fridge and threw it into the sink, turning around to lean on the counter. “Eating shit and breaking shit costs money, and since you don’t seem to have a dime I’m gonna to take it out of your hide.”

Emma nodded. “Yes ma’am.” After a moment, “Can I come out of time-out now?”

Maddie snorted. “Sunny side up. And make some toast, too.”


	6. Run-Up 1.4

Jane decided that the new girl was odd.  
  
She wasn’t a working girl. She wasn’t like Tammy, Roxy, Selina, and all the others. She didn’t dance, didn’t take clients, didn’t entertain, and that was honestly for the best. Even if her hair and skin didn’t disqualify her, the girl didn’t have the figure for it. That, and Jane got a “too young” vibe off of her, a feature alone that would’ve had Angie up in arms. Age was a very, _very_ important number in Thirteenth Heaven, and no one wanted to risk breaking the few rules that couldn’t be brushed away.  
  
Instead, the girl did boring things. Jane had seen the girl pushing around a mop on stage, carrying around boxes big enough that normally needed two big men, and frying potatoes in the tiny kitchen behind the bar. Each time she’d been wrapped up tight, with only tiny glimpses of skin visible where slightly ill-fitting clothes shifted to reveal a tone whiter than paper. Albino, Angie had explained, and that had been the end of it. Well, the end of Angie’s explanation, not of Jane’s curiosity.  
  
The boss damn well knew what she was doing, leaving a secret that obvious out in the open. If Jane didn’t contact the girl after-hours, someone else would. Already the backstage rumor mill had gone into full swing, churning through a dozen small details and spinning them into twice as many possible explanations. Some bigwig's kid, working their first job in the wrong part of town as a form of rebellion. A runaway that Angie had taken pity on, with no more details added because the boss had to keep up some measure of respectability. Alabaster’s secret child, hidden from the public eye for obvious reasons.  
  
Selina had gotten a wig to the face for that last one from Tammy, and later agreed that it was a bit too far, even for fun.  
  
At the end of the day, the girls' pool of knowledge came down to three small facts.  
  
First, they knew that Angie paid the girl in cash. That itself wasn’t that unusual, but it did mean that the girl didn’t have a bank account, or didn’t want to use it if she did. The foreign princess theory gained a few more points, while the few people still supporting the belief of a regular human under the balaclava grudgingly changed their bets.  
  
Second, they knew that the girl was on good terms with Batty Maddie. That _was_ unusual, both because no one in their right mind bothered the old lady who was never more than an arm’s length away from a gun and because the relationship was friendly enough that the girl could hitch a ride. The thought wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility, but it was a bit like seeing Armsmaster riding double with someone.  
  
Third, she’d given everyone who’d talked to her different names, not two of which overlapped, with separate stories for each, and had never messed up the lies. Lying about her name was, again, not unusual, but the depth of the falsehoods was staggering. Alicia had mapped out the stories, matched each to a pseudonym, and the resulting bubble chart made Jane’s head hurt just thinking about it. The general consensus that simple lies were easier than complex ones, and that complex lies drew more attention than simple ones. Everyone agreed that the new girl was trying too hard, and that she must’ve been inexpert but gifted.  
  
Everyone except for Jane.  
  
“Madison,” Jane said, nodding to the girl as she stepped out of the back door. For all her mystique, the girl acted like clockwork. She was always there before the nighttime rush hit, and was always waiting on the curb for Maddie by the time Jane and the rest of the girls started heading home. She always wore a balaclava and wrap-around shades, always had her hair under wraps, and always wore surgical gloves indoors and lightweight biking ones outdoors. A creature of habit, but not ones that lent themselves to analysis.  
  
The girl tilted her head. “My name is Millie?” It came out as a question, cautious and curious.  
  
“Madison, Millie, Sierra, Susan, Rosie, Ronda, if they’re all bullshit one’s just as good as the next,” Jane said dismissively, leaning against the brickwork beside the girl and taking out a pack of gum. She’d quit years ago, but the sensation of chewing something still soothed her nerves.  
  
“I mean, if your name is Candi with an ‘I’ I’ll eat a shoe, Miss Sugarcane,” the girl replied irritably, crossing her arms forcefully.  
  
Jane shrugged. “Takes a liar to know a liar. Everyone’s got a stage name. A good way to keep the creepier guys at arm’s length.”  
  
Cloth creaked as the girl’s hands clenched into fists. “How often is that a problem, actually? Just curious.”  
  
“Everyone’s got a story, some worse than others. Most only have one or two, though. You learn to take preventive measures pretty fast. Angie’s even set up a car pool.” She herself did have one night she’d rather forget, but that was hers and dealt with. The bruises were gone, the cops had put the guy away for a nice, long time, and Jane could get on a bus without triple checking for her knife now.  
  
Not everyone was so lucky.  
  
The girl gave a non committal hum, and for a while the two of them stood there, chewing gum and staring off into space respectively. Jane resisted the urge to break the quiet and kept working away the gum, stoically accepting the loss of flavor and growing tension. The girl kept sneaking glances at her, little head twitches that betrayed either fascination or a level of paranoia that Jane refused to believe a kid could have.  
  
“It’s more normal than I thought it would be.” The words were firmly neutral, so sterilized of even the slightest hint of emotion that Jane had to flick her eyes to the side to make sure the girl hadn’t been replaced by a robot.  
  
Jane spat out her gum. “What did you think it would be? A pit of debauchery, with cages, chains, and trafficking victims? We’re not the ABB. People come for a service, we provide. The job’s just more out-there than most.”  
  
“I was thinking about how relaxed everybody seems.” This time the words were charged with longing, a tone so faint it almost wasn’t there. “Everybody knows everyone’s name, what they do in their spare time, and smile all the time. Even when they’re back stage.” Cloth creaked again. “It seems kinda nice.”  
  
Jane considered the words.  
  
They didn’t sound like lies.  
  
“I’ve worked retail and marketing. This pays better, but the risks are higher. For a lot of reasons.” Jane spent a moment weighing her response, then shrugged. Tit for tat.  
  
“We compete. A lot. There’s a limited number of clients with cash to burn, a limited amount of stage time, and relying on the good will of other girls is a huge risk. You don’t know when someone’s rent will be due, when someone needs to get their kid a dentist’s appointment, or if they’re just going to decide to be a bitch for the night. If everyone plays nice, you can make a lot of cash. If people don’t, then one person makes some cash for the night and gets Angie angry at them.” She dug a packet of gum out of her purse. “It keeps the kids in books and a roof over our heads, and that’s more than most gigs can say.”  
  
She pulled two foil-wrapped collections of chemicals free from the paper box, then held one out to the girl. “And yeah. Some of them are alright.”  
  
The bar of silver hung in the air, silent and patient.  
  
Eventually, the girl took the gum.  
  
“Call me Merry.”


	7. Run-Up 1.5

Being a police officer was actually a very safe job.  
  
Consider felons. If a criminal was dumb enough to try to shoot a police officer, chances were they were too stupid to put together a good plan. That meant that their strategies tended towards ‘overwhelming aggression and boldness’, a practice which meant charging straight into gunfire wearing nothing besides telephone books.  
  
If a criminal was smart, then they committed crimes in a way that didn’t end in shootouts. In order to catch the ‘smart’ criminals, the police had to be smarter than they were. That meant reconnaissance, planning, investigation, and a strike that ultimately culminated in a plan which gave the perp next to zero chance to draw a weapon. If everything went according to plan in a raid, zero rounds were fired.  
  
Mind, all of that only happened when the worst of the worst were involved. Serious bad guys, with lots of money, lots of influence, and lots of power. This was once a decade stuff, maybe once a lifetime depending on where you lived. For your everyday, even the very worst of precincts rarely had violent altercations. The fact of the matter was that crime wasn’t all that common, and if you played your cards right an officer could go through their entire career without shooting at a live target.  
  
If Carrie Layslend had known how peaceful being a police officer would be, she never would’ve entered basic.  
  
Go through basic. Sure. Go through the academy. Sure. Suffer under a bunch of idiots who didn’t know one end of a gun from the other. Sure. Go through more bullshit training, pass more stupid tests, and once all of that is finally done...  
  
Wait.  
  
Wake up. Work out. Eat. Shoot at ranges. Work out. Eat. Sleep. Do special training occasionally. The life of a member of a Special Weapons Assault Team featured an unbelievable amount of downtime punctuated by all-too-brief episodes of clarity and violence, and Cae quickly found that her companions didn’t share her restlessness. Shit-talk was had, a few relationships that aborted quickly, and Cae learned to hide her discontent behind a mask. Everyone else was happy to get paid to do nothing, and she would’ve accepted the pay of nothing to do anything.  
  
Then, during one of the few serious raids, Cae ran into a parahuman.  
  
The intel had been bad. That wasn’t unexpected. What was weird was how one of the hostages burst out of her ropes in a tangle of clawed hands and started ripping through SWAT and gangsters alike. What had been a fairly understandable rescue op quickly became some fucked-up version of hide-and-seek, where anyone who made even the slightest noise got turned into a chunky red mess. The gangsters had stopped shooting at them even in favor of trying to tackle the bigger threat, and nearly fifteen minutes later the combined impact of what had to be hundreds of rounds finally put the thing down.  
  
In the aftermath, her shoulders aching from the kick of the riot gun and blood pounding with satisfaction, Cae decided to join the PRT.  
  
That meant more training of course, which in turn made Cae think about going solo once more. On the other hand, the PRT had all the best toys, and so far she hadn’t seen anyone else offering to let someone shoot parahumans for money. Sure, there were opportunities for cape killers in Africa, and the European governments were always hiring anyone who could tell one end of a gun from the next but Cae was bloodthirsty, not stupid.  
  
Capes. They were the crazy Cae needed in her life. No two were the same, and while a whole lot of them were just variants of the ‘break shit’ category of powers, each had their own unique challenges. No stagnation, no ‘usual operating procedure’, just a quick briefing on what they thought they knew about the person and it was go-time. The fact that capes now owned most of organized crime, and had _expanded it_ , meant that the go-time had also gone up.  
  
While Cae waited outside the unassuming house with a smile on her face and a grenade launcher in her arms, her features obscured by a standard-issue mirrored visor, she once again took a moment to give herself a pat on the back for picking the right career path.  
  
“Run, fight, or wild card?” Cae twisted her head to look at Caleb, the other trooper assigned to the outing. One of the longer-serving guys, who knew how to handle himself in a firefight. He’d earned her grudging respect by coming in second at darts on her initiation bar crawl. Not because he was a better shot, but because he knew how to play the game drunk.  
  
“Run,” she said confidently. The cape inside was new, and in her experience any cape the PRT was able to find before going out on their own tended to be pretty dull. That said, Cae could also count on one hand the number of times she’d seen a recruitment pitch actually work. Capes didn’t like working together beyond groups of maybe three or four, and that was when the people involved were vets. Kiddos? Nah.  
  
“I’m taking wild card. Cocktails or beer?” he asked amiably, holding up three fingers. “Also, do me a favor and check in? I don’t like talking to Grayson.”  
  
“Beer, and don’t be a bitch,” Cae replied, taking a second to tap her communicator. A wrist-mounted sensor on the negotiator inside would buzz, and the signal they sent back would set the tone for her next two minutes of activity. One buzz meant stillness, two meant going loud, and three meant something had come up.  
  
A long half-minute passed in silence.  
  
Then Cae’s comm beeped three times.  
  
“Looks like you win this time,” Cae said, flexing her fingers and lifting the grenade launcher to point at the large, boarded-up window. Confoam was an annoyingly non-lethal munition, but being able to use it was also one of the best ways to get limits on service hours relaxed. Painted a hell of a target on your head too, but those were the risks.  
  
For a few short seconds, nothing happened.  
  
Then the plywood burst like a dam.  
  
Cae’s first shot was right on the money. Compressed gas went _wumph_ , metal blurred, and exploded against the ground by her target in a rapidly-expanding pool of sticky shit. Her target went on to pull free without any difficulty whatsoever and Cae threw the launcher to the side to draw her side arm.  
  
“Confoam doesn’t work,” she muttered into her comm, taking cover behind the van even as Caleb lifted his own weapon and leveled it at the parahuman. White as a cracker, with a red slash at lip height and leaf-green hair. Her outline was blurred, like staring at a target through a scope filmed with water.  
  
“Stop in the name of the law!” he shouted, and Cae rolled her eyes. Vet he was, but over dramatic as well.  
  
That drama got punished when Caleb got knocked over by a metal plate that landed flat against his face, smearing something white over his helmet. By the time Cae was up and ready to shoot the parahuman was long gone, and she _tsked_ in her helmet.  
  
“Parahuman is not in sight, agents on scene not pursuing,” she muttered, turning back to look at her partner. “You alright?” Caleb had his helmet off and was looking at the substance smeared over the visor.  
  
“Quarantine,” he muttered, standing up and moving away from the residue. Basic procedure with capes is that you assumed something was tinkertech until a friendly tinker said it wasn’t, and even then you worried a little.  
  
“My window!” When Cae looked for the source of the shout, all she saw was a stout old woman stomping towards a PRT negotiator, who in turn was slowly backing out of her house. “You pigs are lucky that it was already broken, or I’d be suing you up and down for damages! I have half a mind to do it anyway, just to see what sort of cash you’ll shell out to keep me quiet."  
  
Credit to Grayson, he was taking the dressing-down with more humble grace than Cae thought she had in her entire body. “Ma’am while the damage to your property is regrettable-”  
  
“Fuck the window, I’m talking about the pie!” she said, throwing up her hands. “Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is to make a key lime pie? You have to separate out the yolks, the white, mix things enough without going too far, it’s a mess! And all of that’s gone because you decided that one parahuman without supervision was a parahuman too many!”  
  
Grayson sighed quietly and shook his head. “Ma’am, if she was just a parahuman we wouldn’t’ve had a problem. Thing is, that was Taylor Hebert, a missing child who’s currently wanted for questioning-”  
  
“Nonsense! She told me her name was Emma Barnes!”  
  
Cae tuned out the rest and looked at Caleb, whose face had fallen into a firmly neutral expression that usually preceded him demonstrating the martial capabilities of a black gay man to a group of Empire hanger-ons.  
  
“I got knocked on my ass by a pie,” he said slowly.  
  
Cae retrieved her grenade launcher and checked to see if it was in working order. “No, you got knocked on your ass by a pie thrown by a high schooler in clown makeup.” Satisfied that nothing had broken, Cae settled against the car to enjoy watching Grayson get lectured.  
  
Brief moments of violence followed by long hours of doing nothing. The PRT was a lot like the SWAT, but those brief moments of violence had a way of coming around just a little more often and a lot more intense.  
  
The best job a woman could have.


	8. Run-Up 1.6

What was it like, being a journalist?

Ellard Benson groaned, balling in his eyes and staring at the text in front of him. A lot of the time, it was balancing staying alive and telling the truth. Could you write an article lambasting the Empire for its more-than-weekly hate crimes? Yeah, if you wanted a molotov in your mailbox. Could you talk about the horrifyingly-dangerous life of a member of the ABB? Yeah, if you wanted to wake up to their tongue nailed to your door. The fact of the matter was that the free press in Brockton Bay was free much in the same way a Soviet peasant was. You could say anything you wanted. Kaiser and Lung couldn’t stop you from saying shit. You just also had to stomach the consequences.

With a sigh, Ellard saved the report on the recent uptick in machine guns used in drive-bys to a hidden folder and pulled up a second document that laid out the bare-bones details of a recent celebrity divorce. No one important enough to blacklist him, but important enough that people would recognize their faces, scan the first few sentences, then pay for the rest of the story.

The lights in his office flickered. Ellard looked up to see his editor Murphy staring with a raised eyebrow.

“Closing time, buddy,” Murphy said, nodding at the clock.

Ellard flicked his eyes to the arms, then groaned. Eleven already. “I’ll lock up on my way out.”

“See that you do.” Murphy left without another word. Ellard followed his form through the cheap blinds, then looked at the beat-up, clunky laptop, carrying stories that could maybe strike a blow against the two greatest scourges of Brockton, along with ones that aroused interest and made money.

“Fuck. Me.”

After sending in the divorce story off to Murphy, Ellard packed his gear, locked the doors one by one, and started across the parking lot for his car. Coward, his heart said, words full of fire and typewriter-sharp edge. You wanted to make a difference. To bring people who mattered down. What happened to you?

Ellard took a deep breath, then let it out, lungs aching for nicotine. “May happened,” he told himself. “Besides, Murph wouldn’t run it. All I’d be doing is letting people in the office know that I put fame over their lives. They don’t deserve that.”

If they couldn’t handle the heat, they shouldn’t have stepped into the kitchen. Nonetheless, the voice fell silent and Ellard felt the tension go away. It wasn’t gone, never forever, but maybe he’d be able to smile a little more at the dinner table. May was supposed to be starting some serious project in school, and if he could remember some the details maybe he could-

Ellard felt something press into his lower back, right on his spine, and a bolt of cold ran through him.

“My wallet’s in my right coat pocket,” he said quietly, a lump rising in his throat. “It’s only got a few bucks, but if you check the trunk the tire kit might be worth something.”

The person behind him blew a raspberry and Ellard knew he was fucked. “Buddy, if I wanted money I’d conk you on the head and been on my merry way. I’m here to ask you a very simple question: Trick or treat?”

Ellard's brows furrowed as he counted off the days in his head, then grimaced. Halloween. Of course. That was when the real nutjobs came out, when crime skyrocketed for a week and everything went to shit. There were worse times to be held up, but not many, and not for people as inoffensive as a journalist who toed the line.

The sheer nuttiness of the question also meant that there was no good answer. Maybe the treat was a bullet to the back. Maybe the trick was being let off. Maybe the treat was the taste of lead. Maybe the trick was being shot six times without dying. Brockton had a way of attracting the craziest of the crazy, and there were better than even odds that he’d be maimed regardless of how he answered.

On the other hand, the only more dangerous option would be not to play.

“Treat,” he said carefully, swallowing once. His mouth had gone dry, and a tiny tremble shook his hands. There was a gun in the glove compartment of his car, for all the good it was doing him now. He promised himself to get a shoulder holster after this, along with a conceal carry permit, and to hell with the price.

The figure behind him laughed, long and high. It was a young laugh, more than a little fragile. Girlish, almost. With a start, Ellard realized that his mugger didn’t sound that much older than his daughter. “So, if I told you about a parahuman abusing their power to bully a school girl, specifically a parahuman backed by the government, what would you do?”

Ellard almost laughed. A tip. He was being held up to get a tip on a Ward being a bully. Only in Brockton Bay. “I’d do some interviews and background research, and if the information seemed legitimate maybe I’d write something.”

“What if I promised to kneecap you if nothing got written?” the voice asked, tone unwaveringly cheery.

Ellard nodded once, heart pounding. “Then I’d move it up my priority list.”

Something thwapped against the pavement behind him and Jim felt the pressure on his lower back disappear. “In that case you better clear your schedule. Happy Halloween!”

He waited a minute for the footsteps to recede, then a minute longer just to be sure. Once his breathing had gotten back under control, Ellard turned around.

On the ground was a folder. It looked like any other folder someone could find in an office but stuffed to the bursting, with a gallon-sized plastic bag covered with duct tape on the side. Bungee cords bound the two things together, and a playing card was stuck to the outermost layer.

Ellard glanced around, saw no witnesses, and hurriedly gathered up the papers, threw them into the back of his car, and tore away from the scene of his hold-up at a speed that would get him arrested in any reasonable city. Once he was home and sure that May was in bed, Ellard closed the blinds on his office, unplugged the internet router, and stared at the pile of near-felonies in front of him.

The Protectorate defended its parahumans’ civilian IDs jealously, and the Wards were even more thoroughly protected. Things as small as hair color had been blocked before, and even hinting towards an actual identity was worth his job, maybe more. Launching a personal story about a cape, a negative one at that, would take NDA’s, interacting with censorship boards over the course of months, and more than a little groveling to Murphy to get it published anyway.

In return he’d garner the eternal hatred of the PRT, affiliated capes, and probably not a small amount of the public's ire. Doors would close, maybe forever, and Murphy might let him go to preserve a decent relationship with the powers that be. There was May to think of, and he still had no idea how she was going to get through college.

This all assumed that the story held weight in the first place. He hadn’t looked at the documents yet to maintain plausible deniability, but amateur evidence collection tended to be bad evidence collection. The stacks on his desk could be enough to get him marked as an accessory to half a dozen privacy violation charges and do nothing more than stick Ellard with the radioactive waste of knowing a Ward’s name and face. The best plan was probably to drop the whole thing in the sink, empty a few lighters over it, and drop a match.

Except Ellard hadn’t done that yet.

His eyes flicked up to his degree, still framed, spotless as it had been all those years ago. He still remembered feeling the slap of paper on his palm, the rush of heat that came with suddenly being employable. Brockton Bay had been a step towards the cutting edge, one perpetually put off as he kept trying to make things work, kept trying to use the truth to rouse the public into action against the real stains on their lives. Success came and went, subsiding after arrests, the resurgence after breakouts, and the waves tossed Ellard between satisfied and grimly committed.

Right below the picture was another piece of framed paper. This one was just parchment, but the ink that lay on top of it was far loopier and fancier than the diploma. Most people wouldn’t be able to read it, and even if they did it’d look like gibberish. Jim could, though.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

“Who will guard the guards themselves?” he asked the empty room, scratching at his jaw.

We do, his heart said.

Ellard stared at the heap of danger, then picked up a letter opener and cut the ties.

There was work to be done.


	9. Expectations 0.1

If you want to tell a joke right, delivery matters. Most of the time it matters more than the joke.  
  
Imagine this. A comedian comes up to the stage. They’re the living incarnation of a sweater vest, all technically-correct and dandy clothing, with unremarkable features so bland that they could step on to a crowded street and disappear in an eye-blink. The club quiets down as they clear their throat, blinks their watery eyes, and begins their spiel.  
  
The gags are fine. The wordplay works. There’s even something original in them. All of the right ingredients are present, but the audience is dead silent. No one speaks because it takes balls to head up onto that stage, but neither are they paying attention. Phones come out, discreetly, and people check the time. Hushed conversations restart, eyes on the stage but minds elsewhere. Someone flags down a waiter for another drink.  
  
The audience is bored.  
  
Not everyone makes it past those open mike nights, and that’s okay. Comedy is one of the most difficult things in the world to pull off deliberately, and it only gets more challenging as you add more and more layers to it. Getting the tone of voice, the timing, the vocabulary, all of it demands as much work as a full-time job, and at the end of the day there’s a limited number of slots available.  
  
Now here’s the next one. This time the comedian comes up on roller skates, a trick which (while not unseen) is a little odd. They take out a hard candy, examine it under the light, then bite down hard.  
  
At which point they swear like a sailor.  
  
The icebreaker is broken, infusing the air with minty-fresh contradictions between appearance and reality, completely without regard for the audience. Their story twists and turns, occasionally nodding at the fourth wall, occasionally not, and so unbelievably earnest that it’s less a story telling and more a story living.  
  
More than just being earnest though, they’ve got _style_. Off-the cuff remarks, a roll of the hips, a wave of the hand, the comedian never stops moving. It’s a second narrative, one which allows for the literal next to the metaphorical, where laughter and sorrow can coexist. The words are there but the medium is the message, turning the basic structure into something ornate and beautiful, a rhythm that remakes steel bars twist into floral bannisters, where wood self-varnishes and stains half a dozen living shades of brown, where color spread like blood over the scene.  
  
It takes a few seconds for people to realize the routine is over.  
  
Then applause breaks out.  
  
Their jokes weren’t that much different from the previous act. Worse in some ways, better than others, more apples to oranges than rainfall to hurricane. What made the difference was that the second one gave half a damn about who was watching.  
  
Everyone talks shit about the audience. Everyone tells you to ignore them, that they don’t matter. Tell your story. That’s part one, the part that keeps you in the game until you get good enough to start getting genuine compliments. Step two is remembering that jokes are an observer/observed interaction, at least as complicated as quantum mechanics, and the farther you want to go the better you have to predict the interactions thereof.  
  
I can kinda see them. Kinda. When I’m not pushing out the blur, when I’m not ready to shred the world into its component particles and laugh at how it suddenly seems so _orderly_ , everything becomes a metaphor. Hardness is stone, is ceramic, is diamond, and flexibility is rubber, is water, is bamboo in the wind. People push and pull and change minutely while I look at them, rusty iron that tastes like lime and hospitals or the incarnation of cigarette smoke and used laundry or how Times New Roman etched into the sky would look if you threw it in the trash. I tried describing it to someone, tried to explain what the universe looked like through that special prismatic lens, and it just sounded like nonsense.  
  
The druggie nodded politely, then went back to shooting up.  
  
The thing is, I understand it. I understand that the scent of freshly-spilled blood from Maddie means that I need to help out, that I need to work. I know that the touch of lace on the back of my eye means that Jane wants to bring me into the fold. I saw the hole the size of the word ‘honest’ in the reporter's chest and figured out exactly how to push him into acting. All of those metaphors and lies and references that coat what people actually look like is usable information for me, and it’s _easy_.  
  
Easy to change someone’s mind.  
  
Once I had a place to sleep again, I did some reading. Master. A title. One of the sketchiest types of people with invisible guns stapled to their bodies. Invisible guns that I could see. Trump. Another title. Maybe even more problematic. Then whatever the blur counted as.  
  
I had power now. So. Much. Power.  
  
And I knew what power looked like.  
  
Skidmark looked like a shadow, blue through black, with holes worn through by time and tiredness left too long, always a little unlike what I thought he was. Squealer was chunky, a semi-truck packed into a Beetle, constantly straining at the edges, the base groan of a rave and the scrape of steel on steel. Mush was sand, was dirt, was garbage, with eyes of green glass bottles and teeth of seashells, rot and salt as one.  
  
It was a show of force. Not that they needed one. I didn’t want more than a bed for a night before skipping town, and Skids was happy to oblige. News about Sophia’s assholishness had broken, only about Shadow Stalker, as sanitized as the PRT could make it, and she was still going to juvie. The PRT had lost face. Armsmaster had to explain why he let Piggot take control of a juvenile team and treat them like soldiers. One of the Wards had even quit.  
  
“It’s a good fuckin’ day to be a criminal!” Skidmark had said.  
  
Now...  
  
I don’t know.  
  
I can’t go home. The PRT are still watching Dad like a hawk. I hid a letter in his work desk, explained what had been going on, tried to process what I knew and felt and had to do into something that made _sense_ to a person who hadn’t _lived_ it.  
  
I can’t join a cape team. Not here. New Wave came out less than a day later, told people that there’s no reason to reveal a cape’s ID. They’ll put two and two together, get four, and drop me like a turd. The PRT aren’t going to take a cape who tore them a new one. The gangs are out. All of them.  
  
I can’t disappear. Not with what I look like now.  
  
Skids told me that his good will extended to room and board for three days, then a one-way trip to any major city in the states. Preferably somewhere close by, because buses were cheaper than plane tickets. New York, maybe.  
  
The idea isn’t _un_ attractive.


	10. Gimmick 2.1

Being a super in New York was dicey as hell.  
  
First, because it was dangerous. Cape fights regularly ruined street faces, and while the buildings these days were built to take a hit parahumans had a way of topping anything man could make on his own. That, and saying you could withstand a brawl of _any_ size was like a red flag in front of a bull, and a good number of capes would slug it out by you just on principle if you claimed almost any level of safety.  
  
Second, because being a super meant making bank, and making bank meant a whole lot of people wanted a slice of it. A bad streak of masked weather could ruin someone’s whole damn life, and when people lost their lives they did stupid shit like hold up a guy because they thought they could convince him to give up his property. Some people lumped the personal hits and the property damage together but Edward Lyozi figured that capes weren’t so different from an act of God, and dealing with acts of God came part and parcel with being a super.  
  
Third, because you had some _crazy motherfuckers_ asking for rooms in the Big Apple. Dead-Head Eddie had gotten everyone from Wall Street racketeers to actual drug dealers trying to con their way into two-room apartments, and over time he’d learned that the more scratch the guy could throw out up front the bigger the risk was for accidentally losing a floor to either a lab explosion, forcible FBI entry, or (in one memorable case) an actual sword fight with tinkertech blades between a pair of guys who’d seen way too many Kurosawa movies and had way too much to drink.  
  
Being a landowner in a city with a cape per six city blocks took chops, but there was shit you could do to make it easier.  
  
Capes may have been qualified as acts of God by most insurance companies, but Goldman Haus existed. Their insurance plans were expensive, obscenely so, and every time Eddie sent the cheque with too many zeroes off to their offices he felt the impact in his gut. They were good for it though, covering everything from busted pipes to Legend slapping a tinkertech giant into an apartment building. They’d paid out with a minimum of fuss when Eddie filed his claim, and they’d also helped him find a new building in the aftermath. They were also one of the few firms that actually got villains ‘caged, too, and Eddie figured that every dollar he sent their way helped make the city just a little bit safer.  
  
When people pushed Eddie, he pushed back. Owning guns was hard but you could do it, something that the street toughs Kerry James sent after him (the sleazeball) had learned only after one of them was on the ground. He didn’t die, but the point had been made. Eddie also kept one of the more violent indies on speed-dial in case someone tried to send parahuman muscle after him, and while nothing had escalated that far yet Mama Lyozi didn’t raise no fool. Legend wasn’t always around, and the Protectorate could be minutes away when seconds matter.  
  
The last thing Eddie did to minimize risk was screening his tenants. Everyone did that, sure, but the exact process varied a whole damn lot between different landlords. Finance was the big one, yeah, and you had to have some references, but there were also the little things. Eddie knew a guy who cyber-stalked people to get a sense of what they’d be like for him, while another woman was so good at cold reading that she could figure an indoor smoker in a five second silence.  
  
Eddie himself didn’t have anything that off-the-wall, but over time he’d figured out how to make people uncomfortable. It wasn’t something he liked to do, but when you had a few hundred people living in your building that came with responsibilities. Part of that was keeping nut jobs from coming into his people’s homes and hurting them. That took precedence over everything else, and if for one second he thought someone was trouble the meeting ended and they left. Full stop. Sometimes that cost him potential profit. Sometimes it kept a Teeth lieutenant from taking up residence in his corner four-room. Eddie erred on the side of caution.  
  
Part of that was not letting random strangers loiter around your lobby. Not when they wore a heavy green rain coat that fell down past their knees, covered their face with a dark balaclava and wrap-around shades, and had spent the past hour staring out the window at the pouring rain while whistling nearly non-stop.  
  
Yeah. Bad news.  
  
“Oi,” Eddie said, pitching the word at just louder than technically appropriate for an indoor space.  
  
The figure turned towards him. He jerked his thumb at the door. “This is private property. Unless you’re looking for someone, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”  
  
“What if I told you I was looking for employment?” The words were high and young, kind of like the college students who occasionally tried to slip their ages past him.  
  
“Then I’d tell you to get online and apply. We’ve got an ad on Indeed, and you can wait for call backs just like anyone else.” Kids these days. Computers there to make their lives easier and maybe one in a hundred knows anything about coding. “Now. Get out.”  
  
The figure shot finger guns at him. “Funny story, but I don’t have a computer. Or a friend to mooch off of. Or the library card I’d need to get on one temporarily. Or a convenient back-alley friend that could give me any species of paper information necessary to acquire any of the above.”  
  
“Pretty sure I can’t hire you then. If you can’t get a library card, I’m not sure how you’re gonna to fill out tax forms.” Eddie slowly walked towards the girl. She was taller than him, but that was nothing new. If push came to shove Eddie was more than two hundred pounds of grizzled NYC veteran, and he had one hand in his pocket on a derringer if things went really wrong.  
  
“Third time's the charm. Get,” he said quietly, looking into the shades as calmly as he could.  
  
Exactly as slowly as he’d moved into shooting range, the girl reached up a gloved hand and took off her glasses.  
  
After Eddie got a good look, she put them back on. “I got recommended this place by a guy named Adam, who said that you’d understand what I was going through. He told me that if I could work, I could eat, and maybe I could snag the place by the water heater in the basement if I was lucky. Couldn’t be hotter water than what I left.”  
  
She chuckled a little bit, expression unreadable behind the layers of fleece and plastic. “If you want me gone though, I’m gone. Rule of three and all that. Gotta have your principles.”  
  
After a long sigh, Eddie took his hand out of his pocket and motioned towards his combination room and office at the end of the hall. “I’m gonna eat dinner. You can join me. First meal’s on the house, and same with the first night. After that you do what needs doing, and if you don’t know how to do what needs doing you learn. If you can’t, you can find somewhere else to stay. Understand?”  
  
Footsteps echoed behind him. “Louise I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”  
  
“My name’s Eddie, no it’s not, and you’re not old enough to know what movie that comes from,” he replied, fumbling for the keys to his door. Maybe Adam could be trusted to look after his own skin, but if the asshat thought that he could foist a charity case onto him-  
  
“Casablanca, right?”  
  
Eddie paused, key in the lock, unturned.  
  
“My Dad likes old films, and Mom agreed to watch the artsy ones with him. We stopped doing that after she died, but a few of them stick around.” These words were a little less lively than her responses in the lobby, like the difference between a tiger on National Geographic and one in the Central Park Zoo.  
  
The lock _clicked_. “What else have you seen? Pre-color.”  
  
“ _Maltese Falcon_ , _The Big Sleep_ , and _The Treasure of the Sierra Madre_ ,” she rattled off.  
  
Eddie smiled, pushing open the door. “A Bogart fan.”  
  
“Mom was,” the girl agreed, peering around the space. Spartan, with the bare necessities. Well, bare save for the shelves full of films, a paired video/DVD player, and a TV big enough to serve as a dining table. “So, you like movies?”  
  
“How much do you know about the Marx Brothers?”


	11. Gimmick 2.2

When Joji opened up the door, he was greeted by a scarecrow.

“Where were you last night!?” Mama screamed at Hideo. She was screaming in Japanese, so Joji knew she was serious. Mama insisted that they all practice their English as much as possible, so in the house the only time you were allowed to use Japanese was at meals and when Serious Things were being discussed. Part of that was because Mama was better at Japanese than English, and part of it was that she didn’t want the neighbors to know what she was saying.

The scarecrow looked over his head, then back down to Joji. Joji nodded and grabbed a handful of coat, pulling it towards the kitchen.

“Sink,” he said simply.

The scarecrow nodded, pointedly not looking at the open door and gesturing figures.

“I was with my friends, alright? Hanging out! Leave me alone!” Hideo wasn’t good at English. Or school. Or working. He was family so Joji covered for him as much as he could, cooking the rice and microwaving fish when he came back smelling like chemicals, but Mama wasn’t stupid. Usually she bottled it up, too worn out by her jobs to pick a fight, but today she’d caught sight of a tattoo peeking out from under Hideo’s shirt. Broken glass, formed into the shape of a hungry maw.

Joji thought it was cool, but he knew better than to interrupt the fight.

The scarecrow pulled open the cabinet under the sink, twisted a few valves, and started unscrewing the pipe. Joji settled in to watch, staring intently at how fingers covered in blue latex squeezed different parts of the metal and rotated, slowly peeling apart the plumbing and exposing the heart of the mess.

“Friends? Really? Tell me their families. Their names. Tell me what they want you to do. Drink their liquor? Take their drugs? And you think there’s no cost to that?” Mama was scared. She got scared a lot, and when she did she got big, blowing herself full of air and fire. Not everyone did that. Joji knew people at school who shrunk away when the bullies started throwing rocks at them or made fun of how they did their work all the time or pulled at the sides of the eyes and started talking stupid.

Joji didn’t shrink though, and after getting suspended and a spanking from Mama the bullies didn’t bother him anymore.

He didn’t think Hideo shrank either.

The scarecrow pulled the pipe free, spilling a little bit of water into the bottom of the cabinet. It wasn’t a scarecrow, not really, but Joji had seen The Wizard of Oz last night and the way the person moved reminded him of the stuffed wicker man. They were filled with energy, subtly exaggerating their movements, somehow aware of the area around them without looking at it. Their feet kicked enthusastically as they peered into the pipe through a pair of sunglasses that they shouldn’t’ve been wearing indoors, acting like there was nothing they’d rather do than work with plumbing.

“I think I bring home my half of the rent, and I do it without slaving over a grill for chump change! So what?” The sink had been clogged for a while now, and it had been Hideo’s job to fix it. He hadn’t, putting it off with mumbled excuses, with half-truths, and Mama hadn’t been willing to fight Hideo about it. Instead she’d taken the potential price of paying someone to fix it out of his spending money and called the super, who’d said he send someone up in a few days. Hideo had seen the withdrawal from his bank account, brought it up, and things escalated from there.

The scarecrow flicked the side of the pipe a few times, then shook it furiously. A ball of nastiness, hair and food and indiscernible bits of grey matter, flew out of the end and went splat against a drawer. The scarecrow pumped one fist triumphantly, then put the pipe back in place and began twisting, this time the other way.

“You run with gangsters to pay the rent! We might as well set the house on fire to clean up the messes, or amputate a limb when it gets a blemish! You will stop now,” she finished, tone solemn. “You will join me at McDonalds, you will work the same shift, and when I am satisfied that you can hold down one job-”

“No.”

Joji froze.

“You wanted me to work. I did. You wanted money. I got money. I did what you asked.” This was not how the arguments were supposed to go. Mama always won. Always. When she didn’t, bad things happened.

Mama growled. “You took the easy route, and by doing so you put this entire family at risk! If you want to live under this roof-”

“Maybe I don’t!” Stomping echoed throughout the house as Hideo exited the conversation. Hideo was supposed to take off his combat boots when he came into the house. The fact that they were still on was bad bad bad. The fact that he’d left the room without Mama’s permission, without her saying no, without her saying ‘done’ was worse. “I’ll mail you the rent.”

More footsteps echoed out, lighter and softer than the first, but no less angry. “You will stay here until I say you can go!”

“Make me!”

The sound of skin on flesh was deafening.

Slowly, the scarecrow slid out from under the sink. Joji stared absently at them as they picked up the glob of nastiness that had been blocking the pipe. A blur surrounded their hand, and the glob disappeared.

“That’s it?” Hideo sounded almost dismissive. Almost, because under the disdain was fear. Lots of it. Enough to remind Joji of the too-sweet and too-sour candy apples they’d gotten so many years ago, the fruit too big for the layer of caramel, a treat that had left him sick for a day.

“You will stay.” Joji could see his mother, her image overlaying the scarecrow, chin high and eyes furiously dry, each hand clenched into a fist. Paper over a balloon, like the time the three of them had worked on a mask for the school play, and underneath was panic, yellow and fragile. “You will stay or else.”

Another silence stretched out. The scarecrow didn’t move.

Cloth rubbed against cloth. The door opened, then closed.

After a few more moments, Joji heard a sniffle. Not his.

The scarecrow crouched down, one hand reaching out, then pausing. Fingers tightened, latex squeaking against latex, and then reached out again, settling on Joji’s shoulder.

“One day, out in the wilderness of rural New York, the state, a doe was crossing the street when she got hit by a car,” the scarecrow said. She said. The scarecrow was a girl. “This wasn’t all bad though. That deer, in the wake of the accident, triggered, and became the first non-human cape in the world. She had the power to prance across any amount of space in seconds to make up for her broken legs, telepathy to make up for not having a human voice, and super hearing to make up for losing her vision. With these powers she traveled the world, picking up little kids and acting as a champion of the people who just made a few little mistakes. If you ask nicely for her help, and if she thinks your cause is worth it, she’ll swoop down to the rescue.” The scarecrow paused. “Do you want to know her name?”

Mutely, Joji nodded his head.

She nodded back. “I have no fucking eye deer.”

It took a second for the words to process. Against his will, the corner of Joji’s mouth turned up.

“You shouldn’t swear,” he said quietly.

The scarecrow shrugged. “And kids probably shouldn’t run away from their parents. They feel like they have to sometimes though, just like how sometimes parents feel like they can’t back down.” She lowered her voice. “She really does exist though. No fucking eye deer is a real cape. If you ask nicely, she’ll try her best to help. Promise.”

Joji swallowed. “Thank you.”

She pshawed. “For what? I told a story. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other jobs to get to. I’m a very busy woman, you know. Lots of pipes to clean, toilets to plunge, and tenants to keep track of.”

The scarecrow left. Once she was gone, Joji went back to the room where Mama was wiping her eyes and gave her a hug. Mama hugged him back and made him promise not to join a gang. He promised.

Dinner was tense. Quiet. Hideo’s place at the table was more empty than usual, and when Mama wrapped up the leftovers in plastic wrap she almost didn’t have enough room on the plate. She read Joji extra stories at bedtime, four more than normal, and he was really ready to sleep when she gave him a good night kiss and turned off the light. He stayed awake for a little while longer though, staring at the ceiling.

“No fucking eye deer, please watch over Hideo,” he said to the emptiness.

Somewhere out there, he hoped that the magical, mutilated doe heard him.


	12. Gimmick 2.3

“Woo hoo!”  
  
Jason hurled his now-empty bottle at the nearest street lamp, nailing the bulb and darkening the street to a chorus of cheers. Hideo did his best to shout along, louder than the still-nervous noobs but quieter than the vets that went campaigning with the Teeth. Allie had made it very clear to him that even with her backing he was only part way up the Teeth’s social ladder, and that if he wanted to keep climbing he’d have to toe the line. Wait patiently, search for opportunities, and when one showed up grab it by the balls.  
  
She’d punctuated that last one with a particularly violent grope, digging fingers paired with a savage smile, and Hideo’d been left hard for more than half of the walk back home.  
  
Just like that the euphoric burn inside him went out. Home. Naomi. Joji. He’d kept his composure for two blocks. Then he’d ducked into an alleyway and screamed.  
  
It was an escape, a pressure valve, steam whistling free from a kettle that’d been left on for far too long and left to burn. He could scream or he could think, think about how’d he’d run away, how he’d left his brother, left his mom, because he couldn’t take a hit. He could scream or he could think about how he couldn’t just suck it up and do the boring shit, how he couldn’t fake interest in the droning teachers for long enough to get a C, how he couldn’t figure out how to make fucking _words_ to the open-eyed and Cheshire-grinned kids around him.  
  
Figured that all those years of listening to American music only let him speak when it didn’t matter.  
  
Hideo had only stopped screaming because he started punching the wall, and then he only stopped punching the wall because his eyes had started tearing up. His knuckles tasted like copper and grit, and after finding a bathroom to wash his eyes out he dug out the cheapo phone Allie’d given him he hit the speed dial and asked for a place to crash.  
  
“ _Good to see you’ve cut loose the deadweight_ ,” she’d purred, voice hoarse from the unfiltered cigarettes Hideo still couldn’t stomach. “ _See you in ten_.”  
  
Someone pushed Hideo. Hard. He whirled around, eyes narrowing at the semi-drunk thirty-something grinning dopily at him.  
  
“What you doin’ here, slant?” he growled, leaning into Hideo’s space and wafting the sharp and sour scent of cheap beer into his face. “Teeth are an American gang. Don’t want no weak-ass boys who had to swim away from home.”  
  
Hideo shoved back, making space and sending the drunk stumbling. “I American. You drunk. Soft.” There were other Japanese people in the Teeth, other Asians, other immigrants, other people who were strangers in their own country. The Butcher even wore a kabuto. All of that and shit like this still happened. Allie had told him to shrug it off, that they were looking for a reaction.  
  
That didn’t make it easier.  
  
The drunk blinked once, then threw his head back and laughed. The rest of the gang members laughed with him, sharp sounds that sent Hideo’s hackles rising, and drew away from the two of them, forming a human circle in the middle of the street. Hideo flicked his gaze from side to side, searching for a sympathetic gaze, for a cue on how to act.  
  
All he saw were metal masks and gnashing teeth.  
  
“Put up your dukes, kiddo,” the drunk said, lifting both fists and leaning forward. “Gonna learn you good.”  
  
Slowly, Hideo did the same. The fight wasn’t fair, not by a long shot. The drunk had armor, ragged metal and worn leather, with gloves that had padded knuckles and greaves made of metal. Hideo only had the jacket he’d taken on his way out the door, a windbreaker-over-fleece that he’d sprayed red and black to fit in. His right hand still had wrapping around it from his punches in the alleyway.  
  
The Teeth believed in two for flinching.  
  
The fights he’d gotten into at school had a procedure, a formula that everyone followed. Each side threw one or two punches, someone charged forward to turn it into a wrestling match, and in the tangle of limbs the winner would end up on top and that would be that. It’d been simple, fast, and the worst that would happen would be a few bruises. No one wanted to kill anyone.  
  
The drunk did. He moved fast, faster than anyone thicker than Hideo had any right to. Hideo barely dodged the first punch, had to take the second one on the ribs, and then started giving ground instead of getting hit. The drunk didn’t try to grapple. He didn’t try for kicks, for big blows, or bites. He just sent out the same mechanically precise punches, two at a time, three at a time, fast and sharp and hard as rocks.  
  
Hideo took another step back. Someone shoved him. _Hard_. Dumb luck and surprise let him push past the drunk, and after two stumbling steps he spun around and went back to trying not to die. Dimly, Hideo registered the jeers raining down, the cat-calls, filing the information away. Instead he grit his teeth against the blows that hurt to block, looking for an opening, a chance to hit back.  
  
None presented themselves.  
  
Then the punches stopped. For a few seconds Hideo kept his guard up, then peered past his arms.  
  
The drunk was standing in the middle of the circle, slowly shaking his head. He didn’t look tired. Or even winded. Instead the gangster just gazed down at Hideo with a sad, forlorn expression, so obviously fake that it hurt to look at. It was the same breed of expression that Hideo saw at school, from the kids who knew how to speak, who didn’t have to balance doing homework they barely understood and a job that they could barely tolerate.  
  
“Said I was soft, then couldn’t land one hit. Sounds like a liar to me. What do you think, boys?” the drunk shouted, making Hideo flinch from the volume. “What do we do with liars? With punks?”  
  
“Send ‘em home!” the assembled Teeth shouted back, whooping in unison. “No mama’s boys here!”  
  
Something snapped.  
  
The blow that the drunk landed on Hideo’s neck took his breath away. Hideo still had enough air to gouge out an eye. The second hit was sloppy, a big, slow hook that glanced off Hideo’s shoulder. Hideo took the chance, tackled the bigger man around the waist, and brought them both to the pavement.  
  
He didn’t remember much past that.  
  
At some point he got pulled off the drunk and bundled into the back of a van, bombarded with a storm of more-than-enthusiastic slaps on the back and punches to the shoulder. The words blurred together, the tones melding into a single congratulatory sentiment, and by the time he was back at Allie’s getting his hands taken care of he’d almost forgotten the whole thing. When people sent curious sounds his way, Hideo smiled politely and nodded. That was enough, and after swallowing down more cheap, acidic beer, Hideo stood up and walked to the member’s bedroom. No one stopped him.  
  
The smell of oil, dirt, and sweat in the sheets kept him up, and when the veil of sleep descended it was only ever paper-thin.


	13. Gimmick 2.4

Even monsters needed middle-men.  
  
No one in their right mind met face-to-face with a villain cape. The ‘nice’ parahumans, the ones who dealt soft drugs and held parties, who sold their labor and not their souls, they tended to be more dangerous than any sane person wanted to deal with. The not-so-nice ones, or god-forbid the actively dangerous ones, those you steered clear of altogether if you valued your organs. Even in New York, where everyone had a cape story, where people would brag about how they’d turned down a job offer from the Elite, how they’d managed to outrun a pack of Teeth normies, how they’d once dated a hench for the Adepts, no one ever wanted to actually meet a person who could snap your neck with a thought.  
  
That said, those capes still needed to eat. They needed places to put their ill-gotten gains, to turn goods into cash and cash into laundered money, and needed someone who was marginally less terrifying to make contact with potential muscle. The marginal risk was high, but there was also a lot of marginal profit available to anyone who had the magic trifecta of balls, contacts, and several lifetimes worth of luck burning a hole in their back pocket.  
  
Rosie loved the game, and she wouldn’t trade her position for anything in the world.  
  
“Hello, I’m Rosie Sharp, the CEO of Flower Power Employment, how may I help you?” she asked, smiling broadly as the stick-thin figure bundled up like it was ten outside and not forty walked into her office. A cape, more than likely. Rosie got ex-military, ex-terrorist, ex-government, and ex-Wall Street showing up at her offices, but almost no one was an ex-anything when they were dressed that oddly. That left only the parahuman clientele, a guess confirmed when the figure pulled off their sunglasses and balaclava to reveal pale skin, long green hair, and red irises. Altogether, not even close to the ugliest individual who’d stepped into Rosie’s office, but definitely south of the median.  
  
The cape smiled, collapsing into the padded armchair just slightly lower than most people found comfortable. “Welp, I’m looking for an introduction to the Teeth, and for some reason none of the dentists I asked knew where to find any.”  
  
Rosie’s smile froze on her face. “The Teeth, you say?”  
  
The girl nodded, showing her teeth. “Yup. Not sure if I’ll actually join, but I figure I should probably shop around before declaring my undying fealty to anyone in particular.”  
  
“I’m afraid I don’t work with the Teeth. You’ll have to look elsewhere,” Rosie said, discreetly pressing a button hidden by her desk once with her foot. It took two to set off the claymores and launch her out the window, a necessary precaution that came when dealing with the real nutjobs.  
  
Lips like horror-movie blood turned down in disappointment. “Not even so much as an address? I promise I won’t tell the Protectorate. Pinky swear.”  
  
“The Teeth are a roaming organization, and one that has a high enough turnover rate that I do not feel comfortable directing anyone into their employ. I would be more than willing to assist you with making contact with the Elite, Adepts, Natural Warriors, or other such group.” Rosie settled her foot over the panic button one more time and leaned forward over the desk. “If you are set on seeing a band of murderous psychopaths with little to no respect for human life, I am going to have to politely ask you to leave.”  
  
The cape made a single finger gun at Rosie, and only nerves of steel hardened against some of the more sadistic Masters in New York kept her from flinching. “Did you know that the girl running the register hates literally everyone else in the store?”  
  
“Almita has opened three different bank accounts under pseudonyms, cashed paychecks in all of them several times, and discreetly handed off stuffed envelopes to illegal immigrants that I did not authorize her to hire. Yes I’ve noticed, now please get out.” If the girl had tried to bribe Rosie, maybe she’d have had a future in the game. As is the FBI had a few things to say about individuals attempting to dodge taxes, and frankly speaking the sight of someone’s expression falling as the long arm of the law came down on them was almost satisfying enough to go into forensic accounting. Not quite profitable enough to consider the idea as more than a daydream, but satisfying.  
  
The arm fell. “Dang, I was really hoping that would work. What if I told you it was for a good cause?”  
  
Rosie actually rolled her eyes this time. “Ah yes, the sob story. Tell me, is it your sibling, parent, or dog that’s suffering from a chronic illness? I find the last variety of subjects to be particularly amusing. This is your third and final warning.”  
  
“I mean, I could also owe you a favor,” the cape said, shrugging nonchalantly. “I’m pretty good at figuring people out. Surely there’s someone you want looked into.”  
  
Rosie clucked her tongue. “I do not accept favors as a form of payment for information, and I certainly do not accept them from capes I’ve never heard of who wish to assault my employees with a parahuman ability.”  
  
The cape smiled. “I was actually thinking it could be a personal favor.”  
  
For a long moment the only noise in the office was the muted sounds of traffic and shallow breathing.  
  
Almost negligently the cape threw a packet of stapled papers onto Rosie’s desk. “Lemme tell you about a person who discovers a magic lamp. One day, this girl is walking down the beach, feeling sorry for herself, when suddenly she stumbles over something in the dune. After searching around for a bit, the girl uncovers a magic lamp. Since she’s seen Aladdin, the girl rubs the lamp, summons the genie, and the genie is so grateful it agrees to grant three wishes.”  
  
Roise reached out carefully and began flicking through the pages, smile long gone. Pictures of other days, different days, printed out in black and white instead of tabloid color, but unmistakable. Her and Anna, smiling, posed on a couch in dresses more expensive than anything she owned now. One of the good times, back when they'd both been young. It should've made her happy, thinking back to those days.  
  
It didn't.  
  
“So, the first thing the girl wishes for a billion dollars. The genie grants that no problem, with a set up bank account and everything. No cash, no difficult-to-liquidate gems, no questions from the IRS, just instant wealth that worked exactly the way you'd think it would.” The cape continued speaking, making little gestures with her hands as the story unfolded, painting an invisible picture that Rosie only half-noticed. The rest of her attention was on the articles, on the text she already knew backwards and forwards but couldn’t tear her eyes away from. They'd been sources of cheap thrills before, a shamefully-arousing proof that she and Anna were an item, were envied, were _wanted_ in a strange and voyeuristic way. Anna hadn't liked the attention, but Rosie drank it up by the hundredweight.  
  
“The second thing she wishes for is a fulfilling career, one she can do for the rest of her life without wanting to quit. This is a little harder, but after thinking really fast for about ten seconds the genie tells the girl to go into human resources. She’s a bit of an odd bird this girl, but a brief glimpse into the future shows that it’ll work out just fine in the end, and that things will be worth it more often than not.” Old memories started coming back. Memories about trips to exotic locales, hole-in-the-wall Parisian bakeries that where Anna had ordered in rapid-fire French while Rosie just stood there and looked pretty, about feeling soft sheets on bare skin while smiling in the dark at the sound of a door creaking open, about opening nights just for her.  
  
“The third wish is for world peace. The genie throws up their hands and says ‘I’m a genie, not a miracle worker. Any solution I come up with is going to be this side of a dictatorship, and that’s the best-case scenario. I can do it if you really want, but I don’t think you do. Please ask for something else.’” The last pages though, those were new. Just Anna, or Anna and other women, other men. She looked older, with lines around her eyes and lower breasts. Like Rosie imagined Anna would look when she came home. Still beautiful, still more attractive than Rosie could be on her best possible day, but different.  
  
Those photos didn’t have headlines. But they did have names. And times. And addresses.  
  
Rosie stopped when she caught a glimpse of skin.  
  
“So the girl asks for true love.” Rosie jerked her head up. The girl wasn’t smiling now. “She wishes for a partner that will be with her through thick and thin, who will get her, who will return her affections kindly, who will never, ever, in a million years, hurt her. Man, woman, other, whatever, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the feelings involved, and that there is good will between the two. Maybe a few bumps, but no icebergs.”  
  
One lip twitched up at the corner. Just a twitch. “After a few seconds the genie asks, ‘You want Skynet or a god-emperor?’”  
  
Rosie closed the folder. “There’s going to be a party on Pier 40 before the Teeth leave. Now get out, and you never meet me in person again.”  
  
The girl left. Once she was gone, Rosie pulled open a drawer in her desk, put away the folder of Anna, and buzzed her secretary.  
  
“Send Almita up. I need to fire somebody today.”


	14. Gimmick 2.5

There were some serious fucking downsides to being a cape in the Teeth.  
  
First, you had to get up and move maybe every one or two months, which was a massive pain in the ass. Kenny knew how to travel light, what to save in his duffle bag and what he could just go buy elsewhere, but he was one dude. The fresh blood, the scrubs? Those kids could take an hour to scrape together twice as much shit which was three times as useless. The lieutenants were generally pretty good at making sure people only got on the trucks with the bare essentials, but every _fucking_ time some joker would’ve slipped Mama’s homemade quilt into their suitcase and Kenny would have to beat the shit outta him for being so sentimental. Home was the Teeth, and if you needed more than that maybe you shouldn’t’ve joined.  
  
The second major pain in the ass was less about being part of the gang and more about being a cape, and that was space. All the non-cape thugs kept a two-foot gap around him, an invisible bubble filled with respect and fear in equal measures. Sure he could call someone over, tell them to sit down and listen to him, but it wasn’t the same. He had to have a reason, an order to give, a brief info dump before going back to the silence. No more fucking around, no more stupid jokes, just purpose. Maybe some people could live off of that, but not Kenny. He missed the days of wandering around with a pack of idiots, looking for trouble, finding it, then running before the consequences caught up. The spontaneity was gone, and he couldn’t get it back.  
  
So Kenny threw parties. He spent his cash on drugs and booze, hired bands looking for their first gig, and drank until he fell over. Alcohol loosened a lot of lips, and when people were nursing hangovers it was real hard to remember who’d said what in whatever stupid way. People could backchat him in a rave, cross that two-foot gap, and for those precious hours Kenny could forget what it meant to be Spree.  
  
Well, he could forget until business came up again.  
  
“There’s a new girl at the door. Cape.” Browns, one of the longest-lasting members of Spree’s faction, had to shout to be heard over the baseline. It took a minute for Kenny to parse the words, and longer for him to figure out that meant he had to do something.  
  
With a sigh, Spree pushed the boy on his left to the side and got off of his couch, snagging a barbed-wire wrapped baseball bat and swaggering toward the entrance. “Lemme at ‘er. Get people cleared away, and-”  
  
“Boss, she’s at the bar now,” Browns interrupted, pointing past the writhing dance floor towards a clump of foot soldiers, all gathered in a circle. Laughter echoed out, long and loud, and Spree ground his teeth at the noise.  
  
“Who the fuck let her in?” he demanded, taking a few short practice swings with the bat and scattering other party goers. The buzz was gone, replaced by a pounding in his ears that always preceded a fight. A path cleared for him, and as he approached the bar more and more thugs started warning each other away. The fear aggravated Spree, another barrier between him and his people springing up because of shit he couldn’t change.  
  
“-and that’s when the spy said ‘it’s not a secret gadget in my pocket’,” the girl said, spreading her arms and smiling wide. More laughter rose, coming from people secure enough in their position or too drunk to know when to get the fuck out, and the bartender put a tumbler full of something on the counter. “Thanks for the offer, but I have to pass. I don’t-”  
  
Spree brought his bat down on the glass with a _crack_.  
  
Everyone stopped laughing. After a second, the music died away too.  
  
“Who. The fuck. Are you?” Spree asked, the bat swinging back and forth between his hands.  
  
“I. The fuck. Am Sophia Hess.” The girl flashed him a smile, wide and toothy and rimmed with lips the chemical red of stop signs. She was pale, paler than Browns, who’d get sunburns in the winter, but where his veins stood out like rivers in the snow her skin was _white_ , the color of the dead seashells that sometime washed up on the rocky beaches of New York, Boston, and Brockton Bay. Her hair shone an iridescent green, so deep that when the roving lights fell off of it her head looked like her face was floating in a cloud of shadow. “That’s a lie. You can call me Merry.”  
  
“I’ll be calling you a corpse if you don’t get the fuck out,” Spree growled, pressing his weapon into her breastbone.  
  
Merry frowned and narrowed her eyes. “So this is how the Teeth treats potential recruits. No wonder you guys don’t get asked to stay.”  
  
The silence stretched out. Long enough that Spree knew he’d fucked up, but not long enough for it to seem like he’d given any course of action enough thought. He could feel the weight of the eyes of the Teeth around him, far out of bat range now, grating on the edges of his reputation while his mind raced. Spree didn’t like playing the social games, didn’t like trying to ride the fine line between nice and intimidating, but capes had to play it. You had to be lethal, be approachable if there was a problem, be fast, be responsive, be an icon for the rank-and-file, and Kenny couldn’t do that now the silence had gone on for too long it was going to be a fight in the middle of his first chance to relax in weeks _and now it was all fucked-_  
  
She smirked. “I like it.”  
  
Spree let his bat fall down, shaking his head. An out. A way to back down without backing down. “You’ll fit right in. Another round!”  
  
Job done, Kenny went back to his booth. He collapsed into the worn leather, masking the sudden weakness in his knees with arrogant lounging. He sipped at a cheap beer, quashing the urge to chug it and chase away the taste with something stronger, to head for the bathroom, change out of the chafing armor, and pretend to be normal again.  
  
Instead he watched the new cape. He nursed that single, shitty beer for over an hour, watching Merry as she made nice with his crew. She flaunted a brute rating with shoves that sent men twice her weight staggering, kept people laughing with comments that had them in stitches, and even pulled one of the fresher recruits into a private booth. No matter how he spun it, what Kenny saw was a girl after a good time, maybe a little more. Innocent enough.  
  
Except that girl had powers.  
  
Like he did.  
  
A boy caught his arm as Kenny stood up from the couch again. “Hey man, you okay?”  
  
Kenny shook his arm free of the hand, skin buzzing from the contact, however brief. “I’m good. Going to bed.”  
  
“What about the new girl?” one of the other hanger-ons asked. An older woman, with a twist to her jaw that looked like a break healed wrong.  
  
Kenny waved his hand negligently at them, stomping towards the exit. Another circle formed around him as he moved, a separation so palpable it ached. “What about her? Wake me up if she starts some shit, and if she doesn’t let her do whatever. You can handle that, right?”  
  
“Yes sir,” she muttered. There was more behind that statement, but Kenny couldn’t be fucked to care. He’d run out of energy hours ago, unable to refuel on the stuff of life around him. That had been done by the girl, who seemed to swim between social groups like an eel between metal grates, who took his space by accident, with good cheer, and even the indignant rage Kenny had towards her felt false.  
  
He pushed into the back hallway, and when the door closed behind him Kenny let himself slump against the wall.  
  
Then he dug a phone out of his pocket, hit the second speed dial, and waited three rings for the other end to pick up.  
  
“Hey Jess. Can we talk?”


	15. Expectations 0.2

Things happen, and experiencing things happening is the best way to understand them. Just like that you have the basics of phenomenology, the study of phenomenon as discrete events which are in fact products of consciousness, an idea which only really works if you’re both educated enough to break things down into pieces that simple and stupid enough to forget that air is not in fact empty space.  
  
Going a little bigger, phenomenology applied to other spaces and fields focuses on how the subject shapes the perception of objects and are shaped in turn. Electrons are disciplined, and if you stare at them when they pass through a pair of coin slots they keep their shit together. Take your eyes off them though, and suddenly it all goes to shit and they become a wave. In other words humans matter, something that politicians had been ignoring for decades and which physicists only reluctantly wanted to admit.  
  
Makes you wonder how much of the world only works because we’re looking at it.  
  
Once you get into everyday-useful territory, phenomenology is really just about acknowledging that you, as a human, exist, and that you react to things in specific ways. Those reactions can be observed, recorded, and reflected upon, and if you do it enough maybe you can get something like the truth. Stupidly simple and probably wrong, but at the end of the day I’m a teenager trying to understand how a plate of stir fry could leave me a hyperventilating wreck and maybe I deserve a little slack.  
  
I brought Hideo back home. It had been... weird, playing him. Flirting with him. Pretending like I wanted to sleep with him. It’d been half a lie, half not, a little bit of joking mixed with hungry smiles and touches that I didn’t think too much about but which had made me think about things I hadn’t thought about in years-  
  
No. I’m distracting myself, seizing on details, searching for a way out.  
  
I brought Hideo back home. The Teeth hadn’t stopped me from dragging him away, probably because I strongly implied that I’d be back in the morning. Idiots. Once back in the apartment building, I stayed at the door for long enough to make sure he and Mrs. Lee met again, then made myself scarce before the waterworks started. A few days later the Protectorate announced that the Teeth were officially out of town and Hideo went back to handing out resumes in a ill-fitting button-up, old tie, and work slacks. He looked a lot more calm though, and I always got a polite nod when he passed by me fixing something.  
  
I thought that was the end of it.  
  
And then I slipped on a plate of stir fry in the middle of the night and had _way more problems than I knew how to handle_.  
  
Joji had talked to other kids in the apartment buildings. Apparently Hideo wasn’t the only stupid teenager in the complex, and after a few days where the no-fucking-eye-deer didn’t seem to be making progress he decided to ask me if I knew any other ways to contact her.  
  
Castor’s brother Austin had started wearing long sleeve shirts to cover up scars all along his arms, and Austin had pointed a knife at Castor when he talked about going to Mom and Dad. Marie was worried about the number of boys her older sister Chris was bringing back, along with how tired she seemed once the boys left. Diego had been gone for days, and Guadalupe was beginning to worry.  
  
There were more stories. A lot more. More than one building should’ve had.  
  
So I cleaned up the mess of food, grabbed the sheet of paper filled with painfully-correct block letters, ones which must’ve taken hours to get so neat, and ran for my room in the basement as fast as I could.  
  
Event: I helped someone. Reaction: not much. Event. I saw more people who needed help. Reaction: panic. Lots and lots of panic that I couldn’t afford, that didn’t make sense, and that wouldn’t help anyone at all. When I looked at other events in my life, events where people needed help, what did I see? I tried to help, sometimes failed, and for the duration of _my very best friend’s_ bullying campaign saw the potential approach of assistance as pain.  
  
Fucked. It was all fucked. It was so fucked that it was almost funny. Almost and not actually because people were at risk, because they were asking me for help, because I had a double-sided piece of paper in a child’s tiny handwriting filled with pain and pleas and _I had no idea what to do_.  
  
So I took a step back and looked for the humor.  
  
Gaps. You could make a joke with a gap. Kind of like expectations, to the point that the difference was nearly academic. On the other hand taking things past their logical extreme for shits and giggles was a tried and true trope of tummy ticklers, so the academic viewpoint wasn’t completely useless. A knife to a gunfight, a priest in a brothel, a girl showing up to prom in a white dress while everyone else is in sweatpants, one good deed into an unending demand, the reward for work well done is more work.  
  
The last one, that’s the key. Do good, get rewarded with more opportunity to do good, except it’s a pain in the ass and the reward is literally just part of a Ponzi Scheme of decency. After all, if I do good to someone else, they do good for the rest of the world, and the people they do good to do good themselves, where does it end? God forbid we should all just be nice to one another! What if someone’s nice to me, like Eddie? Welp, then I’d have to pay that niceness forward, which is basically what I did for Joji. Now he’s paying that niceness forward, with the caveat that he’s doing it by throwing more shit on my plate.  
  
Heh. Plate.  
  
I’m distracting myself. There’s a double-sided piece of paper in a child’s tiny handwriting filled with pain and pleas in front of me and I’m trying to make it a joke, something I can laugh off instead of cry over, a quirk of reality instead of problems I could maybe solve if I’m willing to engage with them, to expose myself a little more every time, to re-engage with the rest of the world, to begin to get used to the idea of not just being a socially isolated janitor.  
  
...  
  
How do you eat an elephant?  
  
One piece at a time.


	16. Hook 3.1

It was tough being a Ward in the Big Apple without a mover power. Patrol routes were long, there were too many cars on not enough streets, and with buildings getting knocked over every other week the idea of learning the lay of the land was a joke. Sure there were ways around the constantly-changing cityscape, but most of them had barriers to entry. The subway bikes went _fast_ , and you needed to be a heavy hitter to get the license. You could sprint through active construction sites, but only if you could prove that you could do so without disrupting anything. You could even try to hitch a ride on top of a cab, but then the PRT handlers started complaining about ‘needlessly risky behavior’ and ‘taking advantage of the good will of the citizens of New York’ and ‘listen Youth Guard already thinks we’re literally Satan and this shit doesn’t help can’t you just be _normal_ for once?’  
  
Ty was pretty sure that last one wasn’t an official statement of policy. Just a beleaguered bureaucrat pushed a little bit farther than anyone should be pushed.  
  
Still irritating.  
  
Being a normal person was better in some ways, worse in others. On the one hand, being a normal person meant that Ty didn’t have to endure half a million selfie requests at each and every street crossing, an experience which got old fast. He could listen to his own music instead of the sanitized playlists that the PRT and Youth Guard decided were appropriate for sixteen year olds, nevermind the fact that nothing the FCC had cleared for radio did anything for him. He could wear clothes that let his skin breathe, show off the tattoos he wasn’t supposed to have, swear as much as he wanted, and relax. Maybe being a Ward paid for Maya’s school and kept Sampson in diapers but it was also definitely a job, and while Ty could keep up with it to pay the bills he sure as hell didn’t like it.  
  
The downside of being a normal person was that when you saw a burglary in progress you were supposed to call the police.  
  
For a solid second Ty just stood there, staring at the carefully-broken window by a fire escape a figure in black had just slipped through, one teenager on the streets of New York at way-too-late-o’clock in a neighborhood way too nice for the beat-up Knicks jersey and ratty shorts he was sporting. He fingered the two phones in his pocket, one a sleek piece of near-tinkertech, the other a cheapo flip-phone that his mom had bought him. One which meant he’d have to go back to the PRT HQ for a debriefing, meant that he’d miss another day of class recovering from being up all night. The other almost certainly gave the perp a getaway, a shift of responsibility that put the blame firmly on someone else’s shoulder. Every second Ty waited to choose made the difference matter less and less, to the point that eventually the choice would be made for him.  
  
He sighed, shaking his head. “Fuck. Me.”  
  
Then he walked over into the nearest alleyway, slipped out of his clothes, and changed.  
  
The world looked different when Ty was in lizard mode. It wasn’t a thinker power. At least, it wasn’t a power that did anything in particular. Instead things simplified, got prioritized, then stayed prioritized. Teammates and civvies needed defending, villains needed apprehending, and property needed to be protected. Not necessarily in that order, but when the choices had to be made Ty made them without thinking too much about it.  
  
Ty climbed the fire escape, metal ringing slightly under his weight as he ascended. On the way he typed out the details of what he’d seen, then switched over to the camera and leaned into the window.  
  
The bedroom was nice, if small. Two forms lay under sheets, indistinct in the low light, while the dark figure rifled through a vanity. After a moment they pulled out a box, opened it with a quiet _snap_ of breaking metal, and extracted something.  
  
Ty slipped out of the window frame and put the phone down beside him, saving the video to a cloud drive folder. He inhaled, slit nostrils flaring, and let himself relax.  
  
The hard part was over.  
  
When the dark figure emerged from the window, Ty slugged her in the chin from the side.  
  
It was a good hit. Weak for him, but more than enough to put a vanilla human down. The intruder stumbled a little, staggering over to the edge of the fire escape and catching themselves against the red railing, and remained conscious. A brute then, but not brute enough to straight-up ignore him.  
  
“Fucking _rude_. Do you slap your kids with that-”  
  
Ty threw out two more punches, both heavier than the last. The figure blocked the one aimed for her face, then curled over when his other fist buried itself in her stomach. Inexperienced. Sloppy. A new trigger, more than likely, or simply new to cape fights. He grimaced, one hand slipping up to grab her wrist and wrestle her into a submission hold. More than likely she’d be recruited rather than imprisoned, which meant he’d have another name to learn, another person he’d have to-  
  
Ty hissed as something tore at his hands like a power sander and skipped back on the tiny metal landing, too-dark blood oozing from the almost-road rash on his hand.  
  
Not just a brute then. He adjusted her threat rating up.  
  
The girl picked herself up, shaking out her limbs and cracking her neck. The mask on her face had torn, revealing chalky white skin and ruby lips, and now Ty could see scarlet eyes burning behind her balaclava. Her form was blurred, a watercolor of a person, and where she stepped flakes of metal screeched. Shouts and exclamations echoed out of the broken window behind her but her eyes stayed fixed on him, two gleaming coins of blood-red metal surrounded by milk. “Okay, so maybe child abuse was a bit far. I insult your family, you try to break my arm after punching me a few times, and I remove a layer of skin. I think that’s about tit for tat. Now, I’ve got work in the morning so if we could just decide to call it here...”  
  
Ty considered the offer to de-escalate.  
  
Then he vomited at the other cape’s face.  
  
Whatever protests she had were washed away by ten gallons of highly-pressurized water, then by the three story fall when she slammed into the weakened metal railings and broke through, keeping enough horizontal velocity to end up out on the street. Ty followed after her, hopping over the edge and tanking the fall with his knees.  
  
Maybe a mild brute rating didn’t let you leap tall buildings in a single bound, but it did grant some immunity to fall damage.  
  
He slowly walked over to where the girl was getting up. “Unidentified parahuman, this is Soak of the Protectorate NE, Wards group four. I hereby place you under arrest for breaking and entering and possession of stolen goods. Stand down and wait for the PRT to take you into custody.”  
  
The girl glared at him. Her balaclava was gone, revealing a mane of green hair hanging in wet, lanky strands. “It’s not nice to gush in someone’s face the first time you meet them, you know. No fun at all for me, and you’re wrapping this up way too fast. Where’s your sense of romance?”  
  
Ty stopped two arm lengths away from the drowned girl and eyed her up carefully. “Are you resisting arrest?”  
  
“I’m resisting the worst come-on of all time from a streaking lizard boy. I think that’s a little different,” she grumbled, tucking wet hair behind her ears and narrowing her eyes. “Seriously, think of the children. No one wants to see that barbed monster.” People were starting to lean out their windows, trying to get footage of the latest cape fight for PHO first. Ty sighed internally, and resigned himself to at least a month of innuendos and strongly-suggested workplace manner seminars.  
  
He should’ve snagged a sheet to cover himself.  
  
Pity-party over, Ty called the expended water back to him.  
  
The girl cursed when the liquid crashed into the back of her knees, falling down once again. Ty reached behind him while swallowing the water back up, snagged an over-full trash can, and dashed forward with the makeshift weapon raised. Red eyes widened as he brought the can down and she rolled out of the way, again and again and again as he hammered with the cheap metal container again and again and again, denting and deforming the filth receptacle until it burst in an explosion of half-rotted food and garbage.  
  
She took the opportunity to scramble to her feet, backing away from Soak. He kept after her, shutting out the cheers and jeers of their impromptu audience. When the girl goosed and dashed towards him, the blurriness slipping back over her form, he backpedaled and vomited again. This time the girl ducked to the side, spinning where the water impacted her shoulder and breaking off her charge.  
  
“Nice trick, even if it doesn’t say much for your gag reflex. Do you blow your boyfriend with that throat?” she asked. The words sounded different when she was blurred, a little more echo-y, slightly higher pitched, more hysterical. Ty didn’t dignify her with a response, calling the water back to him and keeping his eyes locked on her center of mass. Brute, breaker, striker, or at least that was what he could see. Keep your distance, limit their movement, and try to hit when the target is out of their breaker state.  
  
His best match-up.  
  
The girl began circling him, the movement made strange and almost illusory by the blurring effect around her. Her footsteps alternated between the sound of crunching gravel, screeching metal, and shredding organic material as she paced through the street and sidewalk. “Completely flaccid. You’re one of the professional types then. Tell me, does that ever get boring?”  
  
Ty’s teammates would have responded. Most of them, at least. They saw caping as a hobby, as an aspect of their life. If they weren’t having fun while patrolling they weren’t living, weren’t taking advantage of their life’s potential, of their power’s potential. They had to one-up one another, constantly crank things up to eleven find new ways and new methods to blow up their egos. One way to do that was banter, engaging with the enemy along the social axis, going after their reputation. You needed vocabulary, wittiness, and hours of preparation behind every quip. Ty found that the campier the hero was, the more homework they did, and for that the punsters had his respect.  
  
Personally, he preferred punching people.  
  
Sirens started sounding in the distance, and the girl smirked. “They’re playing your song, Scaley. Now while we should totally do this again sometime-”  
  
She hurled her coat at Ty. He dashed forward, slapping the article of clothing out of the air, but it was too late. The subway grate shrieked as the girl stomped on it, giving way to the combination of parahuman strength and abrasion, and the girl disappeared into the shaft. By the time Ty was at the edge of the aperture the girl was gone.  
  
Ty considered pursuing. Considered trying to fight a striker/brute in close quarters, in the low-light, without a way to call for backup. It’d be outside his comfort zone, but he still liked his chances against a rookie cape. Even if he didn’t find her the consequences wouldn’t be too steep. Restricted patrol hours maybe, or extended PR work. Punishments because they had to happen, not because his handlers actually thought he’d done anything wrong.  
  
He could have another brawl.  
  
Instead Ty stepped away from the hole and started heading back towards where he’d left his phone. He clarified that the fight was over, that he’d hurt his hand, and that he’d broken a trash can. Seconds later an M/S request came up on his screen. Ty dutifully sent back the all-clear code, then settled in for a wait.  
  
Caping was a job. He patrolled, he did the publicity events, and in return the US government paid him. Mavericks got better press than the people who followed the rules, but they both earned the same salary. Maybe some people liked trading increased mortality for increased publicity, but for Ty?  
  
A cheque in the mail was enough.


	17. Hook 3.2

Donald Kespergov wasn’t able to check his phone until the end of his Linear lecture, a hour-long deficit that meant by the time he’d heard of the newest addition to New York’s absurdly-robust population of capes the news was already old, a preliminary wiki page was established, and that wiki page was taken down after another poster found connections between the new cape and a known cape from Brockton “High Number of Parahumans per Capita because it’s Barely A City” Bay, been shut down by a discussion thread, then validated by the PRT in a display of in-group idiocy that made his psychology minor degree ache with ‘I told you so.’  
  
“Why do I bother?” he muttered, stubby fingers flying over the keyboard in a blur of administrative punishments. Internet forums were shit, are shit, and would always be shit, but for some reason the fact that PHO catered primarily to people who wanted to discuss capes seemed to bring out the absolute worst in them. After purging the main thread of frankly caustic comments on the ‘new’ cape’s similarities to a certain comic book villain (and good fucking God wasn’t _that_ going to cause massive headaches in the not-too-distant future?), he went to the user content forum and settled in for a long, long night of deleting felonies.  
  
As he began the process of deleting the Soak/Pagliacci pornography threads (minor porn was very clearly and officially _banned_ but somehow people kept posting it), Donald opened a second tab and began gauging the general reaction to the new cape.  
  
The internal contrariness and immediate justifications of any and all actions taken by a villain was relatively mild, all things considered. Only the usual suspects were calling for the abolition of the PRT and the establishment of either a Marxist, fascist, or anarchist state, and the morality debates were mostly under control. It helped that a lot of the groundwork had already been done by the PRT, establishing hard(er) data about what the cape could and couldn’t do, along with providing a rough timeline of her development (another piece of information that was both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand speculation had stopped, and on the other hand now Donald had to start banning people for making sexual comments about a teenage girl). The PRT also called her as a villain early on and then retracted the designation, a move which coincided with a disastrously successful piece of investigative journalism that led to the imprisonment of a Ward, a lawsuit against a notoriously shitty public school, and a series of demotions and promotions that had more or less decimated the local department.  
  
Fortunately, that final clusterfuck had been redirected to the Brockton Bay subforum, and thus was not Donald’s problem.  
  
“God give you strength, Tin Mother,” he muttered, glancing away from the absolute disaster that was the city’s official thread. Brockton Bay was a special sort of hell in the United States, closer to one of the more stable Latin American “democracies” or a province in Eastern Europe than an actual factual urban environment in America. The coordinates didn’t lie though, and at the end of the day someone had to manage the internet there.  
  
Donald was just glad it wasn’t him.  
  
The emergencies taken care of, he began gauging how the forum as a whole regarded the cape herself. Fifteen minutes of skimming thread titles and the comments around rule-breaking behavior came to the fairly neutral stance of “not a hero, not a villain,” which was more or less par for the course with teenage capes. While she did fight a Ward (and wasn’t it fun deleting and banning people for posting videos of a fight that had a pair of minors, one naked, in them?), there was a consistent record of wanting to de-escalate, and said fight was among the least destructive possible outcomes from when a pair of brutes threw down. All things considered, one small property crime was nowhere near ethically problematic enough for people to think poorly of a cape with aesthetic.  
  
Once the main thread had calmed down enough for him to take a break, Donald stood up, went to his kitchen, and made himself a sandwich.  
  
In that moment of peace, where he was aware of the internet but not a conscious entity interacting with it, Donald contemplated the media cycle he’d unwittingly become a part of. A parahuman would choose or not-choose to play the game, have a grace period of variable length, and then commit to a group, at which point the majority of the interest in them would die off. It was an over-simplified model of the career of a cape, one which didn’t take into account the intense variability between and within populations of parahumans, had almost as many exceptions as adherents, and made such general claims that capefic readers would call the schedule out for being uninteresting.  
  
What the model could do was turn into math.  
  
Once his sandwich was done, Donald went back to his computer. This time he opened up a spreadsheet, put it on the monitor, and began entering data in a new row. Preliminary effect classification, operationalized life status, public or no, stable housing, and a host of other variables that ran the spectrum from categorical to numeral. A frustrating number of cells remained empty as he finished up, somewhat soothed by the sight of another anonymous cursor beginning to enter another piece of data.  
  
The Parahuman Life Cycle Predictor (PaL-CP) project was a masterpiece, the brainchild of a statistician, an anthropologist, and an economist who’d turned out to be a parahuman and been subsequently barred from Wall Street. By aggregating information, then testing and retesting the data in real-time using code that the eggheads in Silicon Valley were _still_ trying to wrap their heads around, resulting in a surprisingly-understandable interface which let you construct a theoretical parahuman using dozens of variables and create a scarily-accurate map of probable outcomes based on the numerical biographies of every parahuman entered into the primary data set. When PaL-CP first started up, it was forty seven rows, six columns, and the worst office in the stats department of NYU.  
  
Now it had its own wing.  
  
Donald double-checked his entries, then submitted his contribution for review. While he wait for it to get approved, he ran the preliminary simulation for Pagliacci, then winced.  
  
He was probably going to have a _lot_ of work coming up in the near-future.


	18. Hook 3.3

Malcolm pulled up into an exorbitantly-priced parking space that was still too damn far away from his work, got out, fed the meter, and went back inside his car to slap the sticker firmly in place. There was something satisfying about having the salary to be able to just do things like that, a serenity at the restaurant where he could order whatever he wanted off the menu without worrying about the price. He tended to splurge, and justified it by tipping the people who were working jobs he’d have been lucky to have a few months ago. Customers could be shits, but he figured a double-digit tip and a friendly smile might make those heatless nights a little bit easier to bear.

After slinging his messenger bag over one shoulder, Malcolm started down Park Avenue, whistling an aimless, happy tune. And why not? The sun was shining, it wasn’t miserably hot or miserably cold, and one of the street musicians playing sax was good enough to earn himself a Jackson. Malcolm hadn’t missed a child support payment in five months, and if he could keep the string going this month (which he could) he’d be able to go to Zeke’s birthday party. Well, he’d be able to take Zeke out for dinner with Jenna and her new husband along for the ride, but it was still a damn sight better than he’d been before.

It was a day that made a man feel ten feet tall, and when you were ten feet tall you noticed things.

The boy was dressed in a cheap suit, the kind that wasn’t tailored and itched bad enough you’d have thought it was made out of straw, not cloth. His hands were clenched, knuckles white from tension, and his nails were bitten to the quick. A stream of incoherent mumbling was nearly lost to the ambient noise of the crowd, but Malcolm was too used to paying attention to miss it.

“—stupidideaanywayshouldjustgohomeandsleepnotgoingtogetitwhywouldtheyhiremenoexperiencenoskillnofuturejustawastenopointIshouldjustdisappearcatchabusandleteveryonelivewithoutme—”

Malcolm checked his watch, then sat down next to the boy. “Hey.”

It took a second for the greeting to break through the boy’s head. When he looked up Malcolm got a good look at his face, pale and spotted by flecks of red acne, beaded with sweat and scared out of his mind. It was a kid’s face, barely out of high school, and Malcolm knew he’d made the right decision.

Malcolm extended his hand. “My name’s Malcolm. Yours?”

Cautiously, the boy took the grip. “Peter.” His handshake was limp, like a glove filled with sand, and with that small greeting out of the way Peter went back to staring at the ground. Silently.

Malcolm looked up at the sky, savoring the breeze. “So I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume you’re going to your first job interview.”

Peter stood up. “I should go.”

“And if you want some deodorant wipes to deal with the BO, the cost is some advice.” Malcolm reached into his duffle bag and pulled out a plastic baggie of hygiene products. “I’ve got to go in five minutes, so that’s as long as it’s going to take. Promise.”

Peter looked at the goods, then sat down agin. “I just... fuck. I don’t know what to do.”

Malcolm nodded, leaving the gifts on the bench between them. “You’ve sent in a resume that you found useless information on, since you’re out of school you’re probably not going to get a better one, and it doesn’t pay enough anyway. The person who called you back seems like they don’t care, everyone in New York is struggling for any job they can get, and you’ve got a rat’s chance in hell of beating any of them.”

He paused. “That sound about right?”

A laugh slipped out of Peter, high and short. “I’ll keep your identity a secret, just don’t expect me to hench for you.”

Malcolm waved casually. “Nah. Been there before, and I know a lot of people who have. No one’s first job is slick, not if they need a job in the first place. Fast food, cleaning, retail, whatever: it’s all terrifying before you get used to it. You don’t know the rules, don’t know who to hang with and who to avoid, and if you screw up once it could be the end.” He leaned in a little closer. “You want to know I deal with it?”

Peter swallowed and nodded.

Malcolm looked him in the eye. “I don’t.”

They held gazes for a solid three seconds.

Peter’s lip twitched. Twice.

Malcolm went back to looking at the clouds. “I wish I could tell you how it gets better, but I can’t. You go in, you apply, maybe they say no, and you try again. You do it a lot of times, scraping by on savings and unemployment and whatever else you can do, and hopefully you eventually find something you can do until you retire.”

His phone buzzed against his leg. Malcom got up, stretched, and nodded down the street. “I’ve got to go now, but the one thing you do have to do is show up. Get there on-time, be honest as you can, and hope for the best. Once you’ve done the interview, your part is keeping an eye on your inbox and calling them up if you don’t get a response in the time frame they posted. And hey” —Malcolm flashed some tooth— “Remember that you could get the job, too.”

Peter rolled his eyes and picked up the wipes. “Should I try harder while I’m at it?”

Malcolm watched him go. The boy still wasn’t standing up straight, but Malcolm thought he looked a little less beaten than before.

Then he started walking again.

* * *

“You’re late, Snake,” Condor growled, taking the magazine out of his pistol, ejecting the round in the barrel, and thumbing the bullet back into the mag before loading the weapon again. It was tic Malcolm was familiar with, and one he didn’t happen to care for.

“By seconds, max, and I’m already ready to go. Chill.” He tapped his submachine gun twice and nodded at Turtle, who at least had the nerve to not play with her shotgun while she was waiting. “You ready?”

Turtle clucked her tongue twice and held up her wrist, where blue digits ticked down fast. “I’ve been ready for fifteen fucking minutes. Now let’s go, the bossman’s kiddo is entering in forty seconds.”

“Can we trust her not to lose her shit? She’s new, right?” Malcolm asked, double-checking the safety on his weapon as they strode out of the alleyway and towards the bank’s entrance.

“New, but she’s the bossman’s kid. We can trust her much as much as we can trust anyone else,” Condor groused, cracking his neck and pushing open the double doors. “Now why don’t we all shut up and screw over some white-collar fascists?”

Malcolm strode into the bank with Turtle and Condor, three people in suits and masks, gloved and armed. Somewhere else in the building another trio of people in animal masks were moving through the hallways, and in three, two, one...

One of the glass windows burst, a grey blur diving down hard enough to crack the marble floors. When the dust settled, it looked up.

Eastside was an ugly bitch in her changed form. Seven feet tall if she was an inch, covered in heavy feathers and purple, plucked-looking skin, writhing where ropey muscle flexed. She threw her head back and screeched, loud enough to disappear when the tinker-tech earplugs kicked in, and bounded over towards the vault.

Turtle smashed the butt of her gun into the face of a security guard, then pointed her weapon at the customers frozen in fear. “Everyone get down, this is a robbery!”


	19. Hook 3.4

Samson dropped out of the sky and strode up to the police line, where the Protectorate had already gathered. “Never fear, the Mighty Pigeon is here, ready to dash the vase of villainy against the floor of fortitude!”  
  
After he was sure all the PRT squaddies had their guns trained on him, he let his arms drop to a more neutral position. “How may I be of service?”  
  
“You can get the hell out of my jurisdiction is what you can do,” Firebreak snarled, stomping past the PRT agents. Five feet, six inches, and maybe a hundred and forty pounds of scarlet-and-orange spandex-clad Protectorate moved into Samson’s personal space, a power move that lost a lot of its effect when the subject of it outmassed the performer by at least fifty percent. “This is a hostage situation, not a pit fight.”  
  
“Worry not, fellow champion of courage!” Samson slapped Firebreak heartily on the shoulder, feather-light and easy. “I am more than aware of the care which must be taken when capturing the corrupt! For the sake of those simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, I am willing to place myself fully at your disposal.”  
  
Firebreak slapped Samson’s hand away. “Except you won’t actually be at my disposal. You’ll play the good little soldier, do what I ask to the letter of the law, then go off and throw shit to hit the fan as soon as you think you know better because of your _impeccable_ moral code. Get. Lost.”  
  
“Firebreak, stand down.” Samson shifted his gaze up a little to look over the pyromancer’s head. This cape wore white robes, with a black bandana tied over the top half of her face and a gauzy silver veil concealing her mouth. That didn’t seem to meaningfully inhibit her ability to navigate her way through the press of agents, nor did it make the handguns and knives at her waist less intimidating.  
  
Firebreak stepped away as the new cape approached, and Samson took the opening to smile wide, stick out his hand, and take the space given to him. “Hello, fair maiden of morality! I wish to grace this fine endeavor with the gift of my able arms, and seek the approval of those endowed with the authority to grant me permission to annihilate the agents of anarchy with the light of the law!”  
  
The cape looked at Samson’s hand, then up at him. “You’re going to charge in there regardless of what I say, aren’t you?”  
  
“The guardians of the good give no ground to the ghastly gnomes of greed,” Samson said.  
  
She sighed and shook his hand. Once. “Screyes. Eastside is holed up in the lobby with between ten and twenty hostages, half a dozen armed gangsters, and an incoming mass teleporter. She hasn’t killed anyone before but not for lack of trying and we don’t want to push her. Stranger support is ten minutes away at best, and even then we’re not sure if Serendipity can actually sneak past her senses. The heavy hitters are closer, but most of them don’t have the subtlety to avoid pulping civilians. Right now we’re trying to make sure no more villains get in and complicate things further.”  
  
Samson’s felt his chest empty as the description went on, a leak of confidence borne of yet another no-win situation. He’d arrived just in time to learn that the bad guys had won, and now that he’d announced his presence the failure would be pinned to him, regardless of how little he had to do with the situation’s development. Life was a bitch like that sometimes. “A risk that can only reap rewards when those watching want safety for the sufferers of the scheme.”  
  
“A precision pyromancer, multi-angle clairvoyant, and roided-out Adam West wanna-be all watch a bank getting robbed by a bird-themed cape and her well-dressed henchmen and say ‘damn, if only we could really cut loose',” Firebreak muttered, staring angrily at the broken windows and stone archways of the bank’s facade. “The only way this could get any more stupid if an actual circus showed up.”  
  
“Hey, featherbrain!”  
  
Samson spun towards the voice, arms coming up as the ice-cold focus that came on the heels of shock spilled through his limbs. “Boldness is a key component of brilliance, knave!” A girl, pale as death with a mane of hair the color of wet seaweed and dressed in a ragged black tee shirt and jeans, had her hands cupped around her mouth, just inside the legal area. PRT agents already had their guns trained on her, a fact she seemed to more or less ignore.  
  
Firebreak was less subtle. Wavy lines of heat tore through the air in thin, geometric tracings, melting the pavement where they scoured a line in front of the girl “Get the fuck back!”  
  
The cape stepped very deliberately over the line, winking once at Samson and the Protectorate capes. “Yeah, you! The one hiding in the building! See, I wanted some advice on establishing an identity, and I figured that I should probably hit up the most pathetic loser in the city first so I’d know what _not_ to do. I understand it’s hard to make time in between getting the shit beat out of you by the Elite and getting the shit beat out of you by the authorities and flying away as fast as your ugly wings can carry you in between each shit-beating, but I figure that—”  
  
Glass shattered and the cape rolled out of the way of a barrage of feathers, keratin piercing the steel side of a PRT van with a _ting ting ting_ of lethal power. “And you can’t even murder a random cape right. They really don’t make villains like they used to, do they? Bet papa wishes he had a belt big enough for your back but just has to make do with a disdainful _clucking_ noise instead. Probably doesn’t matter too much what with how you can’t take it—”  
  
Samson winced at the _screech_ which rent the air, while Firebreak and Screyes bent over in pain. The PRT agents were more insulated and approached the new cape, weapons firmly trained. A truck-mounted foam sprayer turned to focus on her, and static crackle as an intercom turned on. “Unidentified parahuman, this is your last chance! Cease your speech and lay down with your hands behind your head!”  
  
The parahuman knelt down, placing her hands behind her head, and didn’t stop talking. “Don’t worry though, I don’t think you’re a worthless failure! You’re showing me how to cower in fear, take abuse without hitting back, and generally let life just go on by without worrying too much about. It’s kinda zen actually, just like the sort of ‘I’m pathetic but that’s okay because I’m pathetic’ mantras they give all the losers in high school. Actually, that kinda fits you to a tee, doesn’t—”  
  
The rest of her speech was cut off by a blast of white goo. Aerosol hissed as the turret poured more and more of the stuff over the cape, piling up until all Samson could see was a pile of white chemicals.  
  
The turret cut off its barrage and for a second everything was silent.  
  
Then the front doors to the bank burst off their hinges in a blur of furious villain and Samson had bigger things to worry about.


	20. Hook 3.5

Alissa sighed behind the bar, re-reading the same paragraph on money multipliers that she’d been trying to parse for the past thirty minutes while the jukebox in the back cranked out some old song from the 90’s that she’d heard a million times before. The graveyard shift at the Cranky Flamingo were the most boring and least profitable hours of operation, but they also tended to be the quietest. So long as she was willing to haul a few of the more belligerent drunks out when four AM rolled around it usually constituted three hours of frantic mixing, walking, and not slapping the shit out of people staring down her top, followed by three hours of cleaning and relative peace where she could study between the infrequent calls for drinks. As ways of earning supplemental income for when the scholarships fell short went there were far worse, but that didn’t make it not work.  
  
The bell at the door _dinged_ , a signal Alissa had learned to dread long ago. Setting her irritation at the disruption aside, Alissa closed the textbook, shoved it under the bar, and put on her most vapid smile. “Hello there, and welcome to...”  
  
She trailed off, staring.  
  
The cape looked like shit. Her hair was plastered against her skin in dark olive strips, tangled and matted until Alissa could barely make out the face behind it. Her clothes weren’t much better, torn in half a dozen places and frayed into threads at the hems. Where pale skin showed through the rents Alissa could see traces of purple and green, bruised skin that seemed somehow more sickening for the inhuman pallor that nearly shone in the neon light of the beer signs.  
  
She also looked madder than a cut snake, and only years of bartending experience kept Alissa from taking a step back when the cape staggered up to the bar, _squelched_ onto a stool, and dropped her head onto the countertop that Alissa had just cleaned five minutes ago.  
  
The record on the jukebox ran out, and for a minute silence reigned, each and every patron ready and waiting for the other shoe to drop.  
  
“Beer me.”  
  
The words took a few seconds for Alissa to register, and once it did her training took over.  
  
“I need to see some ID,” she said, pulling a rag out and began to mop up the surprisingly-clean water around where the cape had put her head. Everyone had a cape story in New York, and while her personal favorite centered around getting head from a member of one of Comcast’s teams before he made it big she’d also been in the unfortunate position of having to tell teenagers that no, powers didn’t let you barge into a bar and order drinks.  
  
The cape turned her head to the side and Alissa had to suppress a shudder when blood-red irises glared up at her. “I’m a forty-seven year old man named Timothy Barnes. My birthday is September ninth, and my driver’s license number is zero-one-nine, six-five-eight, two-two-four.” One arm came up, slapped a wallet that look like it was more hole than leather onto the stained wood, and then dropped below the counter again. “Now. Beer me.”  
  
Alissa looked at the wallet, then back into the angry red circles. “You can’t possibly think I’m going to buy that.”  
  
“Changer powers, amirite?” The words were so flat Alissa could’ve gone bowling on them.  
  
“I’m not serving a minor,” she said, enunciating each word.  
  
A chair scraped in the back of the room, a file across Alissa’s already ragged nerves, and she whipped her head towards the sound.  
  
It was Bassard, a regular who worked in construction, and after putting his seat back in it’s regular position he lumbered over to the bar and took the seat next to the cape. After a moment, he leaned down. “Little miss, it seems like you’ve had a rough night. Don’t think it’s fair to take it out on the bartender, though. If you’ve got a problem, you can come talk about it with me and the boys.”  
  
The cape rolled her head over to look at Bassard, red and white glaring up and green and black. “You white knight like that when your wife’s at the bar?”  
  
Bassard’s jaw bunched and Alissa heard knuckles _popping_ where his hand clenched. “You want to take this outside, bitch?”  
  
“Hold up! Are you the girl who fought Eastside at the New York National bank this morning?” Cassie, the ditz who who almost certainly wasn’t as old as her ID said she was, ran over to the bar faster than her heels or her sheath dress should’ve allowed, catching herself against the wood with one hand while the other shoved her phone at the back of the cape’s head. Staticky sounds of property damage and distorted speech blurred out from the device  
  
Alissa forcibly shoved her away from the cape, cutting at the side of her neck with one hand and mouthing, _Are you fucking insane?_  
  
The damage was done though, and the cape turned face-down on the counter. “No, it was the _other_ white-skinned, green-haired cape in New York City who nearly got roasted, did get beat the fuck up, and only escaped because apparently swimming through garbage is too gross for anyone else.”  
  
Bassard sat back up, pensive. Cassie blinked stupidly. Alissa reappraised the cape, thinking.  
  
Then she went over to the tap and started drawing a glass.  
  
“Are you being sarcastic?” Cassie asked slowly.  
  
The cape’s shoulders rose, then fell. “Yes.”  
  
Cassie nodded, then frowned. “But are you sarcastic now?”  
  
Alissa put a glass down next to the cape’s head with a _clack_ of glass on wood. “One drink. That’s all you’re getting.”  
  
The cape sat up, looking to the amber liquid, then at Alissa. “What changed?”  
  
“Fuck the Zoo,” she said simply, swiping at the water where the cape had been resting her head. “They’re two-bit thugs who pretend to be animal rights activists in order to claim the moral high ground and con people out of charitable donations.” Alissa narrowed her eyes. “After you finish that, you get out. My goodwill extends to the bottom of that glass and nowhere else.”  
  
The cape nodded, lifting the glass towards Alissa. “You’ll never see me again.”  
  
She tilted the mug back, emotional as a rock.  
  
Moments later her expression screwed up and she spat the beer out in an amber spray of alcohol and saliva. “Oh my god that tastes terrible! Why on earth would you ever drink that of your own free will?”  
  
Alissa was too busy wiping her face clean with a dry rag and contemplating murder to answer, but fortunately Cassie was there to pick up the slack. “I mean, you have to get used to it first. Beer’s nasty, mixed drinks are way better. Speaking of which, can I get a Cosmo?” She asked, folding into a seat next to the cape. “Also, what’s your real cape name? The PRT are callin you pagalleecee, but that’s stupid. I’m sure you’ve got a better one. C’mon, I’ll help people get used to using it on PHO. I’m, like, _really_ popular, and if I talk to some other people we can totally get your name changed. Branding, right?”  
  
“Allie also gave you the cheapest piss in the house,” Bassard said, motioning towards a rack of brown bottles behind misty glass and raising his eyebrows at Alissa. When she shot him a glare, he lifted his hands in surrender. “Not that she was wrong, but maybe don’t judge a group of drinks off one sample.”  
  
“Whatever. Can I trade my beer for some wings or something?” the cape asked, pushing the barely-touched glass as far away from herself as she could. “And I’m Merry, but apparently that’s taken by someone on the West coast so I can’t use it. Clearly the similarity between a clown and telepath is too much for the poor PRT analysts, so they stuck me with the name of some random Italian opera.”  
  
Alissa set two bottles against the counter and brought her hand down on the caps, taking them off with a pair of _pops_ that startled the only non-regular at the bar. “Bass, you’re paying for both these and the beer on my shirt. Now if you could keep people from robbing the place blind, I need to go change.”  
  
Instructions delivered, Alissa went to the kitchen behind the bar, then to the locker room. The work shirt, easily washable and cheap, came off for one with thin, shimmery green sleeves that would get way too dirty in rush hour.  
  
Then out came her phone.  
  
 _Cray-Z-Cat Lady: Cape @ the bar._  
  
 _AvianGrump: PRT?_  
  
Alissa strained her ears. She could hear gentle conversation, punctuated by Cassie’s giggles. In other words, not violence.  
  
 _Cray-Z-Cat Lady: Not bad. Yet._  
  
 _AvianGrump: Careful, call if worried._  
  
Alissa’s fingers paused, then sped up.  
  
 _Cray-Z-Cat Lady: She’s a kid._  
  
 _Cray-Z-Cat Lady: Like, not out of high school._  
  
 _AvianGrump: Age is a number. Young dog can bite you good as an old one. Be. Careful._  
  
Alissa rolled her eyes and pocketed her phone, heading back into the kitchen. She tore open a packet of frozen breaded chicken wings, threw them on a pan, and stuck it in the oven perpetually left at 350 during business hours.  
  
As the meat cooked in the furnace of invisible heat, Alissa looked up the basic facts about young capes. Youth Guard had written entire seminars on how to approach young parahumans, and while the full 411 wasn’t something you could get off your phone in the back of the bar there were mobile-optimized bullet points on how not to fuck up too badly.  
  
Fifteen minutes later, Alissa came out of the kitchen with a bucket of wings. “One bucket of wings unpaid for by Merry. And no, I’m not going to accept stolen tender. Instead you can pay me in stories about being a cape.”  
  
Merry looked away from Cassie, who’d moved so completely into the cape’s personal space that she was about two inches from being in her lap. Merry in turn had slowly backed up until she was nearly leaning on Bassard. “I didn’t know bars could afford to give away food in exchange for stories but okay.”  
  
After pushing Cassie back onto her own stool, Merry pulled out a wing, tore off a chunk of meat, and started talking with her mouth full. “So, first thing you’ve got to know is that kids are both stupid and smart. The older ones, like me, those are the stupid ones, while it’s the elementary schoolers who are crazy good at figuring things out. Example: I get one idiot kid out of trouble, and the smart kid realizes I’m a sucker for sob stories. Suddenly I’ve got more than I can handle, and I’m helping stupid kids all over the place. Just the other day the was this girl who tried gambling her mom’s jewelry...”


	21. Expectations 0.3

A Jewish man lives to be a centenarian. He’s seen the best and worst of the world, from friends dying pointlessly to the birth of his great-grandchild, in the same hospital he would shortly go to. When he passes, he’s surrounded by his family, and when he closes his eyes for the final time he has no regrets.  
  
And then an angel comes to guide his body to heaven and he’s shocked beyond belief.  
  
After getting confirmation that yes, this is real, that yes, angels have three sets of wings (one on their back, one on the ankles of their single foot, and one covering their eyes), and the yes, the angel has heavenly powers (curing cancer, stopping car accidents, the like), the old Jew accepts that the angel is actually real and not the figment of previously-avoided Alzheimer's. The angel guides him up to heaven, where his body returns to its prime, there’s sex and drugs everywhere, and all the hardcore proselytizers are convinced that they’re the only ones there. The old Jew throws himself into the nearest orgy and enjoys the rewards of some good, clean living.  
  
Wandering between sex dungeons, arcades, bouncy castles, and birthday parties, the old Jew ends up meeting God. After shooting the shit about how great Heaven is, the old Jew offers God a joke.  
  
“What’s the difference between a Jew and a loaf of unleavened bread?”  
  
God puts their head in their hands “Oh my me, you can’t be serious.”  
  
“A pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven because it’s dough.” The old Jew presses on, already smiling wide. “But you see, a Jew doesn’t scream because they’ve already been gassed first.”  
  
God just stares into their hands while the old Jew laughs, long and hard.  
  
Eventually he notices God’s not into the joke and slaps him twice on the shoulder. “It’s hilarious, but I guess you had to be there to get it.”

* * *

When you look at Jewish comedians after World War II, there’s an edge to them, especially the old ones, who remember the bad old days when the New York Times buried stories about the Holocaust. They cross lines no one else will, with a brashness that makes everyone else in the room laugh nervously while looking at one another with a little _can they actually say that?_ on their lips, unasked.  
  
Nothing had really changed, though. Comedy was always tragedy blown up so much that it couldn’t help but explode into laughter from the sheer ridiculousness of the evil. Villains cackled while they enacted their devious schemes well before they were blowing up skyscrapers in real life, torturers took pleasure in the feel of iron rupturing flesh before the blades could reach invisibly across a football field, and bystanders laughed at suffering well before masters could play fast and loose with people’s morality. The week after it came out that Cosmonaut had a double digit body count of teenagers a late-night TV show host was making cracks about how he was trying to “fill the emptiness,” a jab which cost the comedian his life and put the stranger behind bars when the Protectorate caught him trying to run from the scene.  
  
The week after that his best friend finished up a speech at his funeral with “and he died doing what he loved: insulting people who were objectively more dangerous and less batshit insane than he was. Like, bless your heart but goddamn Seth when you insult a villain’s eating disorder you’ve got to do it after they’ve been thrown into the pit-of-no-return known as Canada.”  
  
The thing is though, that sort of comedy always works the same way: you have the bad, then reveal the worse. Expectation, subversion, over and over and _over_ again, relying on the fact that people are dumb motherfuckers that never really learn their lessons to squeeze out laughs about shit that shouldn’t be laughed about in an attempt to make people understand that shit that isn’t a joke, that _eleven million people died for that chuckle_ —  
  
I cut myself off. Along that path lies madness.  
  
Instead I get up and head to the kitchen for a glass of water.  
  
I have my own unit now. Eddie learned I was putting in overtime, and instead of telling me to get the hell out or mind my own business he started trying to give me money. After a few nights of half-hearted arguing, I took a slightly better place. One tiny bedroom, one tiny bathroom, and one combined kitchen/living room with enough room for a bookcase, an armchair, and space to cook pasta. I’m slowly making it mine, one novel and mirror at a time.  
  
After filling a glass with some tap water (say what you will about Upperhand’s rampant insider trading, he’s done nothing but good things for the city's public health and quality of life), I guzzle down half of it, then look in the mirror.  
  
I still get tired. I still sleep. Some capes don’t, and I’d give my left leg for that power. On the other hand, I don’t show signs of tiredness. My eyes don’t get bloodshot, my skin doesn’t darken under my eyes, and I don’t get light-headed from staying up too long. It’s all mental, a sluggishness to my thoughts, where the quips come slower, the punchlines fall flat, and I just want to curl up and disappear.  
  
The girl in the mirror looks like she could go another round. When she smiles it’s something manic, larger than life, not quite evil but also not one hundred percent normal. Her frown is petulant, grumpy, a child cheated of their birthday. There is no in-between for her, no middle ground, no compromise. She has a face of extremes, either one or the other, one which adamantly refuses to admit the existence of the everyday.  
  
Not all changer powers allow the user to revert back. It’s not a common flaw, but it’s not rare either. About one in a hundred parahumans experience minor, irreversible changes, and one in a hundred of those end up like Case 53’s. Notable members of the one-in-ten-thousand club include members of the Slaughterhouse Nine, a Protectorate hero who specializes in deep-cover Sting missions, and a celebrity who looks something like a pornstar who had a tattooing encounter with Jackson Pollock. On the one hand, serial killers. On the other hand, the face of fashion.  
  
I ended up somewhere between Crawler and Blacklight. I still look a little like Mom and a little like Dad, but the color palette is all me. It feels less freakish than it did when I first saw my reflection, and I was even able to get through a visit to the bathroom without flinching at the mirror the last time I went to brush my teeth.  
  
I also missed shark week without being pregnant, and I’m not sure how to feel about that.  
  
I finish the rest of the water, light a candle, and slip into the armchair, reaching for a used copy of _The Princess Bride_. Books. Not quite the opium of the masses, but maybe the heroin of the literate. I’ve stayed away from Mom’s classics, but the lighter stories are fun. Happy endings, maybe complicated but never in question, and always with a smile or three thrown in. It’s fun, imagining things going write.  
  
I pause, not even past the initial frame of the story. The bar. After lying about my age, insulting the fidelity of a man’s marriage, and spewing over the bartender’s shirt, things went swimmingly. I laughed at somebody else’s joke, told some stories, and found a cocktail I didn’t hate. No one called the PRT, a villain group, or Dad, and I got home just in time keep Eddie from worrying about either my capture or my death. After I explained to him that a kiddo’s dad had been in on the heist he calmed down a lot, then told me to stop putting myself in harms way.  
  
“It’s the Protectorate’s job to be the heroes,” he’d said disdainfully. “Take the punch, throw a car through someone’s window, and let a paper-pusher figure out who owes what. You need to stay alive.”  
  
I keep reading about provincial love, pure and innocent, and think about trade offs. How much safety to sacrifice for fame? How much fame do you need to have fun? How much fun do you need to have to be living a good life?  
  
How many expectations do you need to subvert before you realize things just aren’t going to get better?  
  
I turn the page and try not to think too hard about it.


	22. Stand-Up 4.1

Sarissa slumped onto the locker room bench. “Long patrol.” When that didn’t get a response, she turned to face Andrea and raised her voice. “How’re you holdin’ up?”  
  
The other girl looked up from her phone, blinking in confusion. “I’m sorry what?”  
  
“How’re you doing?” Sarissa repeated, quelling the knee-jerk irritation. If Sarissa got her panties in a twist every time someone she was talking to got lost in their phones, she’d never stop getting pissed. Better to just let it go and try again.  
  
Andrea gave Sarissa a weird look. “I’m good.”  
  
Sarissa waited for Andrea to respond, unstrapping her boots, duster, and tinkertech knuckle dusters. She checked and double checked her pockets, took out her phone for long enough to fill out the electronic surveys on what, precisely happened over their patrol, then waited another minute, just staring at the wall, listening to Andrea type.  
  
When the _click click click_ snapped her last nerve, Sarissa grabbed a towel and started for the bathroom. “Gonna take a shower.”  
  
Fifteen minutes and a change of clothes later and Sarissa was ambling her way over to the console desk, a damp towel slung over her shoulders and her gauntlets back in their carrying case. “Howdy, Josu.”  
  
“Don’t use my name while we’re live,” he commented neutrally. “If the mike was on you could’ve just outed me.”  
  
Sarissa flared her nostrils and bit back a comment about aggravating information reveals. Instead, she said, “Sorry ‘bout that, Kaleidoscope. How’re things?”  
  
“Well enough.”  
  
Sarissa waited for him to follow up. When he didn’t, she stepped up to his right hand. “If you don’t got much going on, mind if I—”  
  
“Yes,” he interrupted. Not strongly. Not sternly. Just blunt. “I mind.”  
  
Sarrissa’s hands squeezed into fists, wringing a few drops of water out of her towel. “Alright then.”  
  
In the common room Bastin, Dann, and Sid were jabbering over their game of the week. Sarissa took one look at the piles of cardstock, the raised voices, and the board festooned with pieces, and promptly looked the other way. Zehou and Saphrod were bent over a piece of paper, where Zehou was slowly drawing characters while Saphrod stared at the movement intently with glassy, unreadable eyes, his insectile limbs wrapped around one of his special pens. Two different groups, two different disasters waiting to happen. Sarissa took a few seconds to head to the minifridge, pulled out two sodas, then turned around and started for the labs.  
  
There were ten Wards in NYC East Team Two. The B-team, no matter how many times Zond insisted that all heroes were equal. There was enough game in Yankeetown that being the B-Team didn’t mean as much as Sarissa had feared it would, but it was still a mark of shame they all wore together. Not fast enough for lancer, not powerful enough for the motorbikes, and not pretty enough for publicity stunts. Sure, not every parahuman could be the perfect trifecta of handsome, mobile, and dangerous like Legend, but having a team for just the boring capes...  
  
It felt like bullshit to Sarissa, and she’d stand by that until she was six feet under.  
  
What was more bullshit was how the team itself worked.  
  
Ten people shouldn’t have been enough to feel alone in the crowd. It shouldn’t’ve been enough to create a web of social rules more complicated than most of Dann’s board games. There shouldn’t’ve been camps, or loners, or all the other petty bullshit Sarissa had to deal with at school. It shouldn’t’ve felt both too big to approach and yet too small to find a friend, at once a massive wall of peer pressure and a desert of socialization. They were all _heroes_ , and that should’ve been enough.  
  
Unfortunately, it wasn’t.  
  
The doors to the lab opened with a _hiss_ of disarming biohazard containment measures. Sarissa stomped through, flopped into her spinny-chair, and groaned.  
  
Something powered down behind her. “Rough day?”  
  
Sarissa let out a long sigh. “You know how it is.”  
  
“I don’t have approval for the sensory upgrades yet actually, so no, I don’t.” Wheels spun, and when Sarissa looked to her right Glamshow was there. “Want to talk?”  
  
She still didn’t really get what was up with — she checked their hair, pinned up on _his_ right-hand side — Aaron. Like, dudes deciding to be chicks? Made sense. Chicks deciding to be dudes? Made a little less sense, but glass house and all that. Picking one, the other, or neither, different basically every day, it seemed like the worst of all worlds and the best of none.  
  
It wasn’t Sarissa’s life to live though, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.  
  
“Same shit as usual. Boys are being boys, Andra being a bitch, and the cool people are on a different shift.” She pulled her gear up to the table, popped open the clasps, and starring digging out tools. “I don’t wanna talk. Just get my mind off it.”  
  
Aaron nodded and started his way around the table. “In that case let’s tinker. You thought about the implants yet?”  
  
Sarissa rolled her eyes. “Review board ain’t letting me cut myself open until I’m at least sixteen. Got anything that don’t require surgery?”  
  
He nodded and held his hand over the table. Green light splayed out from it, projecting a schematic onto the metal countertop. “I took a long hard look at Echo’s scans and some of the data from Saph’s fights, and I think I might have a way to make my shielding units block or inhibit master effects. Not sure if it’ll work without plugging into your nerves, but it might be worth a shot.”  
  
The two of them settled into a rhythm, where Sarissa would take a look at an idea, accept or reject it, then watch as Aaron made minute changes to her gear. She’d double check the shifts, see whether the adjustments ruined everything else, and if everything still worked she’d mark it off as something to get tested in the firing range. Maybe half the ideas stuck, and half of those wouldn’t come to much when lightly tested.  
  
Progress was progress though, and after coming up with four things to test Sarissa put down the auto-screwdriver and looked across the table. “You got any tech that I can help with?”  
  
He grimaced. “What do you think?”  
  
She winced. “Review board still riding your ass?”  
  
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”  
  
Sarissa made a sympathetic noise. “Help draftin’ at least?”  
  
Aaron got up and jerked his head at a display table. “That I wouldn’t mind.”  
  
His tech didn’t make nearly as much sense to Sarissa as hers did to him. She wasn’t sure if that was a matter of experience, a function of his specialty, or just plain redneck dumbfuckery, but the end result didn’t much care about the why of her fuck ups. Sarissa would take a look at one of the nodes Aaron wanted to implant under his skin, she’d make a suggestion, and he’d explain why trying that would cripple him. Then he’d take her idea, make it good, and thank her for doing fuckall besides spouting bullshit. Sarissa would swallow her shame, nod along, and they’d move to the next design.  
  
She hated it. Kind of. Getting help, _good help_ , and repaying it with broken, worthless, shit. It always made her feel scummy, slick, like the worst kind of cheat, and after every tinkering session she’s promise never to do it again.  
  
Sarissa always came back though. She always sought out Aaron or Erin or R or whatever their names was. She’d always find a way to work her way into his patrols, onto his shifts, anything to get even a second more of his presence. She knew it wasn’t a crush because Sarrisa knew what those felt like, and it wasn’t admiration (though that was a part of it). She didn’t think she had words to describe the way her shoulders loosened around Aaron, or why Erin could make her smile in the blackest moods, or why she put up with R when they made _everything_ so much harder.  
  
What Sarrisa did know was that feeling like shit for getting more than she gave hadn’t made her stop going to them for help in the past, and it sure as shit wasn’t going to stop her now.  
  
Right after discussing a jumping implant that Aaron was trying to make not shatter his thighs, he got a call.  
  
“One sec,” he muttered, pulling out his phone. Sarissa took the bolt of jealousy, gathered the now-empty soda cans, and started walking for the trash.  
  
“Hey babe... I mean, a little... not, not too busy for you... I mean, things’ll be tight... no, I can totally make it! ... okay, see you in ten.”  
  
Sarissa held open the door as Aaron saved his files, rushed through the log-out procedures, and muttered something incomprehensible to her while sprinting through the doorway.  
  
Just like that, Sarissa was alone again.  
  
She closed the door, leaned into it, and sighed.  
  
“Sarissa, you damn well can’t leave well enough alone, can you?”  
  
The door didn’t answer.


	23. Stand-Up 4.2

R didn’t have their shit together.  
  
That had been apparent from day one. They’d been late with walking, with talking, with potty training, with everything. They hadn’t understood subtraction and addition completely until the fourth grade, and their test scores reflected that. Even now they read carefully, double-checked every complicated word against what the dictionary said it meant, and left the thinking to people whose brains worked right. They’d coped by working five times harder than everyone else, a task with which coffee had helped. When that hadn’t been enough, they’d gone to speed. Then to worse. None of their crutches worked forever though, and eventually they’d had to find different ones.  
  
Their memory was spotty now, and these days they figured that was a blessing.  
  
They’d gotten better since then. Not fixed, not all the way healthy, but better. Life felt less like a rat race and more like a marathon. Sleeping was still hard, still felt like unforgivable waste, but the little steps mattered. School wasn’t impossible anymore. The dates got removed from R’s syllabus, the scheduled events excused, the work pared down into something that R would be able to accomplish in a twenty-four-hour day and never more than that given to them at once. Tutors helped, ones who could break up the assignment into manageable-looking pieces, and who could stand to be around R for more than a few minutes at a time. There were never enough special-needs specialists to meet demand though, and even fewer who’d work with parahumans. More common were the student tutors, volunteers who needed the resume padding and pocket money desperately enough to sign a contract semi-blind.  
  
“This is a remarkably restrained outline.” Katie didn’t do compliments. Specifically, she didn’t try to spin things. Things were what they were, and value judgments flowed from what the goals were. If something was a means towards a desired end, it was good. If an end was undesired, it was bad. If the means was bad but the end was good, a re-evaluation of both was in order. Her blue eyes remained steady, her blonde hair was always tucked into the same artful bun, her clothes were always clean and free of wrinkles, a bastion of order against a chaotic world.  
  
It was soothing, being around someone that settled.  
  
Erin nodded. “I answered the question, then limited that answer to everything within an eighty percent confidence interval.” It felt wrong to rely on something that felt as insanely inaccurate as one in five times, but the data didn’t lie. Her scale was skewed, and what felt like too little effort got A’s from the graders. Trust the system, trust the rules, and the result would be something like normal.  
  
Katie put Erin’s work inside her folder and started packing up. Erin took the signal and stood up, heading to the door and holding it open. Session over, date starting.  
  
Once they were out of the school building, Katie glanced at Erin. “You do remember the process we have for English essays?”  
  
Erin nodded. “Read the book. Once. Write down one sentence, no longer than two lines, about each page. Find a very simple argument. Discuss it with one other person for thirty minutes. Don’t focus on the time limit. Get one to three pieces of evidence for each part of the argument, no more than two layers of research deep. Draft each paragraph individually, body first, then conclusion, then intro, individual lengths no longer than twenty five percent of the suggested essay length. Send in for feedback, revise over the course of one day, repeat once, turn in.”  
  
Katie smiled and Erin’s heart skipped a beat. “You do remember.”  
  
R didn’t understand their own feelings. Too many recursive logical chains plus too many drugs in the past plus too much _everything_ in the present had broken something inside them, some sort of lens which told them which flush of heat was anger, which was embarrassment, and which was both. Trying to figure out emotions through physiological response felt like trying to unmix paint by stirring it with a brush, and R had long since given up on getting a good grasp on them.  
  
Katie made them feel pink though, and that was a good color.  
  
The date was similarly relaxing, like a well-worn path. They sat down at the same restaurant, ordered the same items as they had last time, took the same thirty minutes to eat, then spent another thirty minutes talking about whatever came to mind. Sometimes that was nothing and the two of them would just stare at one another, enjoying the silence. Sometimes it was Ward’s business, and the two of them would have to speak in code.  
  
The subject didn’t matter so much, and the fact that the time spent was the end goal always left R light-headed when the cheque came.  
  
They took the long route back. Through Central Park, down to Central Station, and eventually they’d part at the trains. The buskers changed every time, a little chaos thrown into the mix, but the sort which didn’t set off Erin’s alarms. Katie would hold R’s hand, right or left, whichever felt correct at that given moment (today it was her left) and together they’d watch the city both wake up and go to sleep when day shifted into night. Throughout the entire thing Erin would never be able to figure out if she was dreaming because each touch felt too soft, too warm to match up with a thing that could actually happen, the mere act of _being_ with someone an impossibility they’d thought about endlessly in a haze of uncontrollable hormones and idle thoughts that had felt like waste until they met _Katie_ and the simplicity of _being happy_ while also aware that _they were happy_ tangled up the wires in their brain and made them at once lost in the moment and fretting over the future, the past, the best way to get more of whatever _this_ was while enjoying what they had, and _R could feel themselves slipping off again—_  
  
Katie stepped in front of Erin, one hand cupping her cheek while the other squeezed just a little bit tighter. “None of that. Now kiss me.”  
  
Erin did, and for that moment managed to forget how to think.


	24. Stand-Up 4.3

It was rough, not being able to bring a laptop to school. Or the more critical books. Or deciding not to wear anything nice. Or having to put up with high-school bullshit at an institution of learning which should’ve selected out the assholes during the application process. They were the sort of setbacks which made other people cut their losses and duck out, or try to find a different school which had some free scholarship money, or skip classes in the hopes of dodging the worst of the abuse, or finally give in and go back to working a soulless minimum wage job.  
  
Instead Isabel knuckled down, grit her teeth, and took the verbal abuse as stoically as she could.  
  
It wasn’t imaginative. Racist slurs, fat jokes, and slut-shaming. They stayed clear of queer bigotry (probably because Jess was lesbian) and from socioeconomic indictments (because Clara had been literally a homeless orphan), but apparently every other identity was fair game. There was probably a paper in there somewhere, one about the reverse-intersectionality of hyper-aware undergraduates and how diagnosis of social ills did not imply treatment.  
  
It was a tangent, and as the conversation shifted away from how she was probably an illegal immigrant Isabel let her mind follow it, abandoning the one-sided discussion of her parentage and mental ability to begin laying out an outline, considering possible sources, and figuring out whether she’d have an opportunity to actually work on the paper or if she should shelve the thesis for post-grad study.  
  
“I wonder if she pays other people to take her tests? It’d explain the grades, but I wonder what blackmail she has on the real students? Do you think it’s illegal or just embarrassing, and they go along with it out of pity?”  
  
Isabel felt her jaw bunch and tried not to glare over Kathrine’s shoulder. She could usually count on the rest of the gang of basic white-savior girls who couldn’t handle being wrong about race to focus on trying to browbeat her into the ground with their Google-searched ‘facts’ about genetic inferiority, but Kathrine always brought it back around to school. She tried to attack the idea that Isabel had actually earned the A’s, push her into the gaping chasm that was the imposter effect, and make her wallow in questions of adequacy. She’d highlight flubbed class presentations, temporary deficits of vocabulary, the moments when Isabel’s otherwise-sufficient knowledge of English would fail and she’d be left a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by hungry eyes and apathy in unequal amounts.  
  
“I think its got to be pity. I’m not sure she’s smart enough to figure out who to target, so someone else had to subcontract it out.”  
  
“Or maybe her mom sucked the dick of a CEO on the side and he’s paying off the school.”  
  
“Maybe both. It’d take a lot of pressure to get Ass-lerson to remove the stick from his ass.”  
  
Half a dozen retorts burned on her tongue. Papers to be cited, theorists who would shake their heads at the actions of their disciples, appeals to a basic sort of decency which required only an acknowledgment of humanity. A sarcastic apology for being better at understanding the systems of oppression which they were all supposed to be studying, including those inherent to higher education, and a consoling sweetness for their collective lack of sense. A quiet outlining of all the wrong in the actions the semi-feral pack of bitches, and how it violated half of the conduct rules. It would’ve been easy to voice all that was evil about the situation, and more cathartic than words could describe to lay into the group of pretentious, arrogant, casually-evil _children_ who’d felt that being shown up in the field of academics was a wrong worthy of redress.  
  
Instead she held her peace. Reactions made it worse. Two for flinching and all that.  
  
Eventually one of the cracks about her stomach to breast ratio got through, Isabel shed a few tears, they all laughed a few more times, and left, going back to their late-night rendezvous with all the other popular people. Isabel, meanwhile, went to the bathroom, cleaned up as best she could, and then made her way to the library. There, she logged onto a computer, re-changed her password for the school Microsoft Office account that got locked out like clockwork every day, and began working on her research proposals because life didn’t care if you felt like shit, work needed to get done, and if she was going to maintain good enough scholarships to partially pay for her brother’s braces then something as small as a crying fit wasn’t going to get in the way of a perfect essay.  
  
It was dark by the time she left the library, cold on the subway back, and Valentine was still up when she got back.  
  
“Why aren’t you in bed?” she asked, barely putting any heat in the words. At this point she’d stopped trying to get him to have a healthy sleep schedule, and she figured the benefit of seeing an authority figure return home every night probably outweighed the marginal cost of an hour or so of sleep.  
  
He shrugged, head pointed at the TV, where some inane cartoon was playing. He’d already changed into his pyjamas, flannel pants and a sleep shirt that she’d bought him for Christmas a few years ago and was already outgrowing. “Toilet was clogged. Janitor’s fixing it.”  
  
A gurgling sound came from the bathroom, and moments later a bandage-masked figure emerged, a toilet plunger with the head covered by a plastic bag in hand. “The pooper is now ready for doody!”  
  
Isabel suppressed the immature snicker which bubbled up her throat. “Since that’s taken care of you, turn that off and get to brushing.”  
  
Valentine nodded, slipping past the janitor. The janitor in turn strode towards the door, whistling along to the echoes of Val’s cartoon, but paused at the threshold.  
  
“What?” Isabel asked, crossing her arms. “Rent’s on time, and part of it is fixing toilets.”  
  
The janitor shrugged, with shoulders that seemed sharp enough to nearly cut through her flannel shirt. “Yeah, but dealing with dumpers all the time gets boring. Got anything else for me to do?”  
  
Isabel busied herself getting a glass of water, mentally running through the checklist of things which needed doing. Groceries, laundry, and general tidying up were all personal chores, the A/C unit wouldn’t need to get properly fixed until spring at the earliest, the lights were all working and didn’t need new bulbs...  
  
She put down the glass. “No, I think we’re good here.”  
  
“Sure? No pests that need removing, screws tightening, pipes cleaning...”  
  
Isabel snorted. “Get the fuck out, my little brother’s here.”  
  
The janitor laughed, leaning against the doorway. “He knows the fuck word and you know it.”  
  
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it.” The grousing felt good though, a genuine gripe to have when words so often failed her. Isabel pulled down another glass, and after pausing at the sink went to the refrigerator instead, pulled out two aluminum cans, and sat down at the dining room table. “Thank you, though, for babysitting him.”  
  
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
  
The janitor made no move away from her position in the door frame though, and after her first sip Isabel sighed heavily.  
  
“I need some space. Just... to clear my head.” She turned towards the mirrored lenses, too far away to make out anything distinct, but the image completed itself in her head. “Could you take care of Valentine this Saturday? Not for the whole day, but long enough to let me catch up on homework? There’s a big paper coming up and—”  
  
The janitor flipped the plunger into the air, letting spin through three revolutions before snatching it out of its arc. “Say no more. The viscountess of porcelain thrones will return for her coup d’toot on the coming day of rest.”  
  
Isabel rolled her eyes and swallowed down the rest of the bitter brew, managing not to make a face this time. “Just be sure not to run across any royal ass-assins. I hear they’re the foul sort.”  
  
“Hah!” The janitor moved out of the doorway, letting it slowly fall closed. “Until next time, Izzie!”  
  
“‘Til next time, whoever you are,” Isabel muttered, staring at the closing wooden wall between her and the rest of the world.


	25. Stand-Up 4.4

When Aaron’s hand found its way to her ass, Kathrine almost couldn’t believe it. Going out with a gender-fluid, nearly-paranoid, obsessive-compulsive tinker with a thing for schedules and routine had a hell of a learning curve, and one of the things she’d learned very early on was that it was almost impossible for them to switch roles once settled. If she came over at the appointed time and R was researching then she’d be researching with them until their evening date, and no amount of make-up or come-hither could change that. If Erin had decided that she was going to relax that day, any and all uncomfortable-yet-necessary conversations would have to wait until their next meeting. It was a level of control that felt profoundly uncomfortable to lose, and if the appeal of dating a Ward hadn’t been so deliciously tempting she’d probably have quietly asked to be given a different pupil.  
  
Aaron pulled his head back a little, cheeks flushed, eyes dilated, and pressed hard enough against her that she could feel his arousal. “Can I stay over?”  
  
“Yes,” she said breathily, pulling him back down for another kiss. The hand left for a second, then returned, and after a moment she felt the elevator lurch into motion against her back. The brushed-steel surface was cold against her back, the carpeted floor soft against her bare feet, and their respective formalwear nothing more than a delightfully thin barrier.  
  
It took a few tries to get her keys out, and a few more to get them into her door. Once there, the heels in her free hand dropped to the floor, her purse went to one side, Aaron’s jacket came off his shoulders, and one free hand fumbled for the lightswitch, all while she tried to remember whether she’d bought condoms recently or if Aaron would have an implant to take care of that—  
  
“Oh my fucking God!”  
  
Aaron’s arms tightened around her, and Kathrine recognized the words. She then recognized that they were from an unfamiliar voice, put that together with the context, and promptly felt a shot of New Jersey winter shoot through her, twisting her head towards the voice’s source.  
  
A startled-looking scarecrow of a girl, with dark green hair, bright red lips, and infinitely pale skin was sitting in Kathrine’s recliner, a glass of water placed on top of a magazine on the coffee table in front of her, a paperback clutched delicately in both hands, and her eyes owlishly wide, bright enough that Kathrine imagined her own reflection trapped inside the crimson irises. Fluorescent lights had washed every shadow from her skin, giving her the life of an early Disney cartoon, the effect almost powerful enough to cover up the shock evident in a gaping mouth. She was dressed in plain black canvas pants and a black and green flannel shirt, a size or two too big and rolled up over slim forearms that ended in black-nailed hands, the very picture of working class chic mixed with carnival make-up.  
  
For a breath, the three of them stood stock still, locked in a tableau.  
  
Then Aaron whispered, “Run.”  
  
Kathrine had given herself the luxury of a few daydreams about capefights. They usually involved some sort of kidnapping, escaping whatever feeble bonds her captor had placed on her using conveniently-but-not-unreasonably placed tools in her cell, then sneaking her way into an antechamber where she’d play a pivotal role in a furious, acrobatic battle between R and the villain of the week. The lived experience of being alive in New York meant that she intellectually understood that capefights weren’t like Saturday morning cartoons, but since it was a fantasy and your odds of getting caught in a parahumans’ brawl were slightly below that of getting into a car crash she’d figured it was a safe enough fantasy.  
  
Of all the things she’d misjudged, however, the number one thing was the _speed_.  
  
Aaron had stepped around her and started shooting almost as immediately, filling her living room/kitchen/everything combination with packets of green light. The pale-skinned woman literally blurred out of their way, her form turning into a slurry of color as she ducked and weaved between the blasts. In seconds Kathrine’s furniture was splinters, her TV so much plastic and circuitry, and she could barely remember to breathe.  
  
Kathrine remembered Aaron’s words. _Right. Run._  
  
Out the door, towards the elevator, remember that it needs to be called, down the stairs, get to the first floor before remembering _You have a phone!_ , remember _phone in the purse_ , remember _purse on the floor of the apartment_ , keep running, remember _phone booths take emergency numbers_ , burst out through the lobby, onto the street where everyone is also running away, barefoot in the snow, hear the sounds of a capefight on the fourth floor, keep running, keep sprinting, slip once, feel something burn, get up again, keep running through the crowds of people screaming about the fight, keep searching for something, anything—  
  
 _—Phone booth—_  
  
—occupied by someone else, jabbering loudly, almost too fast to be understood, something something _Holy fuck there’s a capefight going down on Third av and Eighty-eight, someone throwing green lasers at someone else get someone the fuck on this_ —  
  
 _—Sirens—_  
  
—keep running and running and running and running and running and running and running because that’s what Aaron said, the cape, the one who knows what to do when a stranger shows up in your house _for no reason at all_ —  
  
 _—“Miss!”—_  
  
—and there was one of the great, big, armored vans, the ones with PRT logos on the side, spilling out troopers and plainclothes detectives with badges hanging out, too like a movie to be real, with one of them holding up his hands placatingly, eyes briefly locking with hers, then flicking his gaze over her shoulder as one hand waved her down the street. A tide of humanity pushed Kathrine along, past the rapidly-deploying line of armored PRT soldiers, past the frozen traffic, away from the alien sounds of fighting...  
  
...until she came to in a strange part of town without her wallet or phone, and had to make a collect call to her mom from a public payphone in order to explain that she needed a ride and a place to sleep for the foreseeable future.


	26. Stand-Up 4.5

Melissa turned around, standing at parade rest, and made eye contact with everyone else seated in the conference room, a picture of R’s unmasked face twisted with rage on the projector screen behind her. “This, I believe, is what’s known in the biz as a ‘fiasco.’”  
  
“No. Shit,” Marty said flatly, emphasizing the second word with the _bang_ of fist on table, driving a spike of pain between the two halves of Glenn’s more-than-slightly hungover brain. Marty was a big man, a vet from before there were capes, who dressed like he could be recalled any minute, and while Glenn appreciated his ability to field questions from even the most irritating reporters with grace and discretion the man’s in-meeting conduct left much to be desired. “So what do we do about it? Can it be contained?”  
  
“We’re well past that point,” Ellen said, pulling out half a dozen tabloids and sliding them across the table. A positively corpulent woman, dressed in a hideous maroon suit with white shirt and garishly chunky gold bracelets. She had the unerring knack to make anyone who talked to her feel listened to, which more than made up for smelling like a chimney with lung cancer. Each had a different photo of a young man and green energy blasts on the front page, along with a few celebrity scandals mentioned in small print for the few people in New York who weren’t addicted to cape news. “R’s civilian ID is well and truly blown. We could try a relocation, but their powers are distinctive enough that flags would be raised for any halfway competent journalist.”  
  
She grimaced, the inch-thick makeup nearly cracking under the force of her displeasure. “That, and this is New York. We’re so high-profile that a literal supervillain lives on Fifth Avenue. If a recently-graduated Ward who got their cover blown goes MIA for more than a week, someone’s going to start looking.”  
  
Kelly cleared his throat, leaning forward in his chair. A stick-thin, strikingly handsome man, he was the newest addition to the team, and had yet to screw anything up badly enough for Glenn to threaten to fire him out of hand. “So if we’re just fucked, what’re the damage control options? Do we need to worry about a suit from R, a class-action piece from the Elite, Youth Guard...?”  
  
“No, yes, and probably not.” Samuel, the legal consult for this meeting also happened to be the worst dressed, sporting a filthy track suit and designer eye bags, probably because it was literally four AM. He seemed mostly alert though, a state Glenn chalked up to the four empty cups of coffee stacked in front of him. “Glamshow’s probably not going to endanger his best chance at serious protection for the foreseeable future, the Elite will sue over anything, and as of two hours before the incident Glamshow had become a full-fledged member of the Protectorate, including having reached their majority well before the incident in question. They can choose to make a deal of it and rely on public pressure to convince the judge and jury to let it through anyway, but they’d run out of money before we do and need to pick their battles. I wouldn’t worry about it.”  
  
“Riveting as this conversation is, I think we need to get back to addressing the elephant in the room,” Glenn said, raising his voice to just above what was considered socially acceptable. Unnecessarily rude, but frankly speaking they were all pissed, and showing some anger would do more for group cohesion than any number of trust falls. “How’s the public reacting?”  
  
Dead silence fell.  
  
 _That bad, huh?_ Glenn thought.  
  
“R fired indiscriminately into the street and pursued a villain for several blocks,” Ellen finally said, pulled a tin of chewing tobacco out of her purse, ripped off a length, and started gnawing on it with all the manners of a hog in its trough. “No civilian casualties, but plenty of property damage. Their face is now tied directly to a parahuman losing control in public, which means their career’s shot straight to hell.”  
  
“We’re still taking care of them, right?” Kelly insisted, making direct eye contact with Glenn, jabbing a hot knife of shame right in the part of himself Glenn tried to keep unjaded. “We have a job for them which will pay the rent, something they can transition into?”  
  
Marty nodded across the table. “Their specialty is broad enough that they can work as a backline tinker if they want to, and if not there are less-public positions for them to fill. Those normally require a few more years of experience, but I know some people who might be willing to set up a sort of internship as a replacement.”  
  
A jaw-cracking yawn echoed across the table and Samuel pushed back from the table, stretching with an ease that drew a frown from Marty, a dead glare from Ellen, and a forty-gauge tightening of the lips from Kelly. “Do you guys need me anymore? I want to go back to sleep.”  
  
“Send your bill to the front desk,” Glenn said, waving him off with one hand, drawing attention back to himself with the gesture and taking an obnoxiously loud sip of his coffee to cement control of the situation. God save him from the terrible group members he’d thought he’d left behind in college. “For now, lets spitball apology themes. R’s sleeping and will probably stay that way for at least another four hours so we’ll have to work without them, but when they get up we can start working collaboratively. They’ve got an otherwise unblemished record and their power isn’t obviously freaky, so this is going to be a lot easier than if Saphrod tore apart another car.”  
  
Ellen spat a dark brown globule of spittle into one of the lawyer’s paper cups from across the table, an act which made Kelly grimace but which Glenn and Marty had long since become used to. “Does that mean we can issue fewer press passes?”  
  
“More,” Glenn replied, shaking his head. “If we issued fewer it’d imply that R had flown off the handle more than they actually had, and they’re not a kid anymore so we can’t hand-wave it with minor protection laws.”  
  
“What about the spin doctors?” Marty interrupted, his eyes narrowing. “What’s their game plan for this fiasco?”  
  
Glenn took a deep breath, imagining the oxygen flowing into the furnace of his lungs and keeping the fury that’d been simmering inside him since the first phone call of the morning, and allowed himself a brief fantasy of suddenly triggering with power enough to wreak bloody vengeance on those who’d go after _kids_. “A Ward got ambushed in the home of their girlfriend. They’re going to rip Pagliacci a new one, salt the grounds of her reputation, and shift her up on the priority list. If she’s still around in a month, then it better be because she’s apologized, turned herself in, and is now on our side doing birthday parties.”


	27. Expectation 0.5

A pair of high school friends grow up, separate, and lead their separate lives. They don’t keep in touch, not really, but do occasionally nod politely as they pass one another in the street, less a proper recognition and more the reflex of formality beaten into them by halfway social lives. Eventually though, fate conspires to bring them together for talk, and Mary and Elizabeth find themselves sitting at the same bar, sipping martinis, and Mary is pouring her heart out.  
  
“I tell you Lizzie, my life’s a mess. I’m out of a job, Evard’s going bankrupt, and the kids are nightmares. It’s like my whole life is falling apart.” She throws back the last of her drink and sighs. “I just don’t know what to do.”  
  
Elizabeth shrugged and ordered another pair of drinks. “It could always be worse. Stay strong.”  
  
After that evening the two of them go about their lives, things change, and some things don’t. They both end up a little older, a little greyer in the hair and more wrinkled around the eyes, and otherwise continue living life to varying degrees of success. It’s not so long until they find themselves at the same bar, drinking the same drinks, except this time Mary’s far less composed than she was last time.  
  
“Everything’s gone straight to hell, Lizzie! Our apartment burned down less than a week after we stopped paying for renter’s insurance, Evard’s parents won’t have us, my mom’s barely scraping by as-is, and the kids are getting to college age when we don’t have a cent in the bank!” She reaches for the next glass, then pauses. “I’m not even going to be able to pay my half of the tab tonight! Tell me, what am I supposed to do with this sort of life!?”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Elizabeth says, patting her friend on the shoulder and taking the drink herself. “I’ll cover tonight’s drinks. Just remember it can always be worse.”  
  
Time passes. Not enough for things to feel like the future, or little enough for things to feel stable. It’s the sort of gap which makes you bang your head on the top of a small car when driving, or stub your toe something fierce without tripping, or realize that it hurts to get up in the morning for no damn good reason at all. Like static on the radio, wear on a tape, or the gradual erosion of natural beauty, the entropy inherent to existence tears a little bit out of the people who inhabit it every passing moment, and the longer you’re stuck there the worse it gets.  
  
When Mary and Elizabeth meet for drinks for the third time, they’re nearly strangers.  
  
“I’m at my wits’ end, Lizzie, ready to slit my wrists, and this time I mean it! Evard’s been cheating on me, Steve’s off dealing to make ends meet, and I haven’t heard from Sarah in a month! We’re living out of the trunk of a Honda Civic, none of us have eaten a real meal since Christmas, and the interest on our loans alone is utterly crippling! I had to steal a purse to get bus fare to travel here, and the only reason I’m taking the time to do it is to ask you for gas money so we don’t get booked for leaving our car in the same space for too long. Please, Lizzie, can you help me?”  
  
Elizabeth, who’d married into money, opened her wallet and pulled out the cash she had, discreetly pressing it into the stolen handbag with one hand while the other picked up her drink and saluted something both worthy of the gesture and invisible. “So long as you remember that things can always be worse.”  
  
“And what the fuck does that even mean?” Mary shouted, bringing her hand down on the bar top hard enough to draw the attention of the bartender, who Elizabeth silently warded away with a wave of her hand. “Tell me, Lizzie, what could be worse than a ruined marriage, fucked finances, and no place to call home? Is my son being a crack dealer somehow better than him selling heroin, or my daughter’s absence better than her death? Tell me, little miss special, what the fuck I’m supposed to be thankful for!?”  
  
The bar stood silent as Elizabeth finished her drink.  
  
“It could be worse because I could be the one living your life.”  
  
After we threw the feuding ex-lovers out of the Cranky Flamingo, business went back to normal. I couldn’t get the scene out of my head though, and started asking around until I got the full story. It makes me uncomfortable to think about the gap between the two of them, how two people so insanely separated by fortune could still know one anothers’ names, still care about each other’s futures in any capacity, and then with that knowledge still be callous enough to literally start a bar fight with a cape in the same room.  
  
When I came by Allisa held up a copy of the _Times_ , folded open to the picture of Glamshow’s snarling, unmasked face, and asked for an explanation. I told her I’d tried to do some good, that good had been done, and that I hadn’t known nothing about anything. That’d been enough, and apart from a few conversations I’d noticed her having on the side with other regulars it’d mostly been like any other Friday night.  
  
I still feel shitty about it. I still think back to all the things I’ve lost, to what a Ward might’ve had in addition to that, and want to bash my head open against the nearest concrete wall. A shred of self preservation and the knowledge that I’m probably harder than most brick and mortar prevent me from giving it a shot, but when a fourteen-year-old parahuman backed by the force of the law calls you a no-good, filthy, stinking snake with all the honor of a horse thief...  
  
It makes you wonder which Western you’ve wandered into, and whether being the man in black is a good thing in that flick.  
  
I’m a _persona non grata_ now. That means they send the adults after me, the guys who’ve been doing the cape thing for years and managed to survive it all. I’m not a serious threat, not like the Teeth, nowhere close to the Nine, but still bad enough that some of the nicer patrons decided to look for drinks elsewhere when they saw me sitting at the bar. I offered to cover up my face, but Bassard told me they could go fuck themselves, and Allison had told me they didn’t tip anyway, so I stayed.  
  
That, and I really need a place to go to when I head out to have a night on the town.  
  
I think the apartment complex is better now. It’s not done, never done getting better, because things like getting addicted to drugs or not quite making enough money to make rent or being black in a white school don’t ever get solved, but the worst of its stemmed. Austin’s found a woodworking class which keeps his knives pointed somewhere else, Chris has stopped bringing people home, and Diego’s working an under-the-table job with a boss who’s the manageable sort of asshole. The plumbing’s a little less generically passable than it was, Eddie’s been showing me the basics of electrical work, and I’d like to think that the million and three everyday issues which plague most people have at least been partially addressed by the undocumented clown living rent-free in a good, atheist Samaritan’s basement.  
  
I’m also a villain. I’ve unmasked two Wards now, one intentionally, one not so much, and the fact that I’d had no contact with Glamshow previously doesn’t apparently mean anything at all. I wish I was good enough to say that I’d still do it, that the loss of public faith in me was worth the alleviation of a single person’s suffering, that all costs are worth it in the battle for common decency...  
  
...  
  
...  
  
God, is it true that one millennium is like a second to you?  
  
Yes, my child.  
  
Is it true that a million dollars is like a cent to you?  
  
Yes, my child.  
  
In that case, could I have a few cents?  
  
Sure, it’ll just be a second.


End file.
